— Main Prize of DOCU/UKRAINE Competition, Docudays UA International Documentary Human Rights Film Festival, 2025

— Best Feature, Riga International Film Festival, 2024

— Official Selection, International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, 2024

— Official Selection, Venice International Film Festival, 2024

An audiovisual diary of Ukraine’s immersion into the abyss of the first two years of Russia’s full invasion, made up of places, occasional characters, rare dialogues, intraframe sounds and silences which, when put together, capture the chronology of how the war became normalised. Against the backdrop of this (meta)physical landscape of collective disaster, a new generation of Ukrainians aspires to imagine the future.

Olha Zhurba's observational documentary masterfully captures the devastating impact of war on a country and its citizens.The film immerses viewers in a world where war becomes the norm transforming us into eyewitnesses to the unfolding events.

By juxtaposing sound bites from frantic calls to Emergency Services, the voices of people’s desperate attempts to flee war zones, to boys recounting the discovery of dead soldiers in a war-torn village in a voice over, with beautiful, controlled and sometimes even otherworldly aesthetic shots,  Olha Zhurba creates an almost a numbing, shocking effect.

The stark contrast between the stunning visuals and the underlying horror contained within each frame is just one of the reasons why I think ”Songs of Slow Burning Earth” is nothing short of a masterpiece.

— Nanna Frank Rasmussen