Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on October 8, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Ukrainian Film Club at the Harriman Institute for a screening of the 2024 feature documentary “Viktor,” directed by Olivier Sarbil. Olivier Sarbil and the story’s protagonist Viktor Korotovsky will be in attendance to discuss the film with viewers. The discussion will be moderated by Yuri Shevchuk.
Viktor, a young deaf man in the city of Kharkiv, warily watches the enemy’s onslaught on his hometown in the early days of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine. A fan of samurai films, raised on stories of war, he dreams of becoming a warrior but is repeatedly turned away when he tries to enlist in the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Eager to give his life purpose, Viktor embarks on a quest to find his place in the midst of a war he cannot hear. The film premiered at the 49th Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in September 2024 and was featured in the prestigious Platform Prize program.
The richly atmospheric black-and-white documentary is a true piece of art and a novel war of storytelling that erases the line of separation between the protagonist and the viewer.
In Ukrainian and Russian with English subtitles.
Trailer
Director Olivier Sarbil, born in Corsica, is a multi-award winning documentary Director and two-times Emmy® winning Cinematographer based in New York. Over the past two decades, Sarbil has worked extensively in the Middle East, Africa, Europe, North America and Asia, on many of the most pressing global conflicts and social issues that the world has faced.
In 2011, his life took an unexpected turn when he was severely wounded by a rocket-propelled grenade while documenting the civil war in Libya. His wounds only strengthened his resolve to continue telling stories that further the understanding of the human condition, in all its contradictions. Since then, he has filmed from the frontlines of the war in Syria, the spillover of that conflict in Lebanon and Jordan – and was in Gaza during the 2012 war with Israel. Sarbil accompanied French troops deployed to combat jihadists in Mali and filmed in the Central African Republic at the height of the interethnic violence. From 2014 to 2015, he documented the war in eastern Ukraine, following Russia’s illegal annexation of Crimea.
In 2016-2017, over the course of Mosul’s nine-month battle, Sarbil followed a group of young Iraqi Special Forces tasked with leading the fight against ISIS. The resulting eponymous short film, “MOSUL,” aired on PBS Frontline. His directorial debut was met with huge critical acclaim, garnering Sarbil an Emmy nomination for Best Documentary, an Emmy win for Outstanding Cinematography and a BAFTA nomination for cinematography, among countless other accolades and awards. The Guardian described the film as “an astonishing portrait of urban combat, and a gripping reflection of the universal, eternal truth of warfare”.
For his first feature, “ON THE PRESIDENT’S ORDERS” (2018), Sarbil filmed a chilling portrait of the ongoing drug war in the Philippines. Praised for its clarity of vision, striking images, and unique access, the film garnered an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Documentary, with Variety describing it as “a wholly cinematic, sensory experience, with straight-ahead reportage electrified by glaring streetlights and a panicked urban wall of sound.” The film was further recognized when it won the Royal Television Society Award For Photography, celebrated for “a bold, brave, and masterful use of the lens.”
From 2020 to 2021, including six months embedded with the forward deployed US Special Forces in Afghanistan, Sarbil has been working with Academy Award®-nominated Director Matthew Heineman as cinematographer for his film “RETROGRADE” which chronicles the end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
From 2022 to 2024, Sarbil directed and filmed “VIKTOR,” produced by Academy Award®-nominated Director Darren Aronofsky. The film, a uniquely intimate portrait of a Deaf person’s experience of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) and was featured in the prestigious Platform Prize programme. IndieWire described the film as “an up close and personal, highly stylized excursion.” Roger Ebert praised the documentary as “a piercing indictment of the ways we’ve made a spectacle of war.”
