Daily life on the Ukrainian war front is not just the images that appear on the news. Along with the drama of the victims, the explosions or the trenches, there is silence. The documentary 27 tank soldiers It tells of the hours of waiting, of the memories before the conflict, of the missing, of taking refuge in abandoned apartments, of cooking on the stove and of preparing to go to the front line. After an exclusive preview for EL PAíS subscribers a few months ago, it is available on FILMIN from July 12th.
The director of the documentary, Mónica Ceberio, explains that the idea was born from the curiosity to go beyond the figures of the conflict. “Hundreds of thousands of civilians have gone from a completely normal life to war. What do they feel? What do their families feel? How do you deal with daily life in war?” With these questions, Ceberio, the special envoys to Ukraine Cristian Segura and Luis de Vega and the director Carlos Martínez, went to the war front to live with three Ukrainian soldiers for a month. It was a two-stage journey. In April 2023, before the army’s counteroffensive against the Russians, and in October of the same year. Martínez remembers that “they were very intense days, we needed to capture the soldiers’ daily details and, for security reasons, we could only access them for a few days.”
During the documentary Filmin subscribers will meet Volodímir Orenchak (53 years old), director of a drinks import company; Alexander Karman (54), baker; and Tarás Havrilenko (37), who worked at the Kiev city council before enlisting to fight. The three formed the crew of tank 27. “The three soldiers slept in the city of Huliaipole, on the Zaporizhia front, a place completely devastated by the Russian army and with very few residents, where it was dangerous to enter and leave,” recalls Ceberio.
“What we hope”, explains Martínez, “is that the viewer sees an unknown part of the war: the fear, the waiting, the relationships that are generated between comrades. It is a documentary that goes beyond the action and approaches the most intimate side of the conflict. Anyone can see themselves in the lives of these soldiers, who until two years ago lived like those of any European.”
Tank soldiers 27 It is edited with the power of the original sound, without narrations that interrupt the protagonists’ story. The documentary, on which the team worked for an entire year, premiered in February exclusively to EL PAÍS subscribers and was a finalist in the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation journalism awards presented last week in Colombia. Its premiere on Filmin marks the first collaboration between EL PAÍS and the audiovisual content platform.
Filmin is the leading digital platform for quality films and series and the doyen of the sector in Spain. Founded in 2007 by Juan Carlos Tous, Jaume Ripoll and José Antonio De Luna, it has established itself as a point of reference in the audiovisual sector in our country. With the arrival of new competitors in the state market of Video on demand, Filmin has not only maintained its position, but has not stopped growing in recent years, as demonstrated by its expansion into other territories, the association with Vodafone or the creation of its first original productions.
