Zov

February 2022. Pavel Filátiev is thirty-three years old. He is Russian. He is hired in the Army assault forces. One day they receive the order to leave. They don't know where they are going or what his mission is. Between rumors and indications, as they march in the formation of a column of armed vehicles, marked with a "Z", reality is revealing, day by day, the truth of their mission: they, the Russian Army, are crossing the border with Ukraine and advance towards Kherson. Two stories converge in this act of confession and rebellion, in this warlike and sentimental chronicle: the first is that of a soldier who goes deeper into the front line (to the confusion and lack of information, the precariousness of the conditions in which they find themselves), and the second takes place upon his return, two months later, when he runs into another front: that of a civil society in which the word war does not exist and television broadcasts propaganda and falsehoods, while life goes on and no one seems to stand up to corruption and power. This stark and tragic first-person account - the first and so far only direct account of the invasion written by a Russian soldier, and therefore the only one to describe the conditions of the Russian Army and what it did during the first weeks of war - has the value of immediate testimony, still burning, of a conflict that continues.