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On February 24th 2022 the Russian Federation invaded the Ukraine on three fronts. What was originally planned as a "special military operation" to decapitate the government and turn a sovereign nation into a Russian puppet state, turned into a prolonged war that saw the complete destruction of entire cities and thousands of civilian casualties.

Sergei Loznitsa's film is a different kind of war documentary, different to the brutal carnage that is visible in films like 20 Tage in Mariupol (2023), but more close to Olha Zhurba's Songs of Slow Burning Earth (2024). War has besieged the land like a plague, lika a force of nature that makes no difference in what life it takes. But it is not natural, and the enemy remains faceless, hidden behind a trail of unfathomable pain and suffering. What has invaded the country, as it seems, is death and destruction itself.

Loznitsa's camera captures a tainted glimpse of everyday life in a war-torn country, between soldier's funerals, weddings, children in school, demining teams, people lining up for food rations, going about their daily routines, and a constant threat of air raids in every corner, every minute, every day. There are scenes of collapsed buildings, rescue workers and hospital staff trying to save the lives of victims. These are no pictures from the front lines, there are no tanks in the streets - and ripped out of context the viewer might think he is witnessing the aftermath of a terrible disaster. But the disaster is not an accident, the real catastrophe is a society trying to survive, trying to adapt, trying to resist, fighting for its existence, while the rolling thunder of war rumbles from afar.

In a remarkable scene an older woman stacks up bricks from her bombed house, alone in the middle of nowhere, the nomansland of an otherwise pittoresque landscape. A picture so iconic, reminiscent of the "Trümmerfrauen" after the Second World War. It begs the question what the war was doing here in the first place, miles and miles away from any strategic installation or any other object of military interest.

There is a creeping danger in war, when it turns from serving a political interest to serving itself; when the violence and destruction, the very presence of existential threat become a new normal. For a moment, in a specific place, war might be silent, invisible, seemingly far away; but Loznitsa's "The Invasion" is a haunting and depressing reminder that it is everpresent.

The documentary series makes a compelling statement at the very end: The future of mankind will be decided in the north.

Climate change, aka global warming, will have profound effects on the arctic regions of our planet, and will eventually effect all of us on a global scale. While the director of this two-part documentary couldn't really decide if it's more about the environmental or political aspects, it reflects the complexity of the entire topic: The changing climate will turn the arctic regions from a once uninhabitable world of ice into future accessible zones, contested by a variety of northern countries like Russia, Norway and Canada. Inevitably, it seems, political, military but also economic interests and motivations will collide at a time when unpredictable environmental changes with huge global ramifications loom ahead.

While it's certainly not the best of this kind of documentaries, it highlights critical recent developments with both new challenges and opportunities, but also new potential threats in a place of our world, that for most of us seems too far away to be of any significance.

How do you eliminate millions of people? This question had dwelled in the minds of Hitler and his inner circle for a long time. By July 1941, Germany had turned into a fascist dictatorship under the "Fuhrer" Adolf Hitler; the concentration camps were full of people deemed "unwanted" and "subhuman", the war in Europe was about to escalate into the second World War, and the Holocaust had already begun. Now the NS elite looked for the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" and delegated this task to the chief of the Reich Security Main Office, Reinhard Heydrich. A couple months later, on January 20, 1942, Heydrich invited top representatives of the cornerstone political and military branches to a meeting at a villa at the Wannsee in Berlin.

There have been a couple of movies about this most infamous conference in modern history, especially the German TV-movie from 1984 and the British-US production "Conspiracy" from 2001.

All movies face the same problem: Little is known about the actual event, one of the few historical sources is the only surviving copy of the conference protocol that was authored by Adolf Eichmann and Heydrich, both now known as the architects of the holocaust.

This means that we don't really know how the meeting took place, how the participants behaved, what they talked about apart from what's on the record. All of that has to be "invented" by means of film dramaturgy and historical knowledge about the people involved.

This latest film, as well as the previous German movie from 1984, is based on a play by Paul Mommertz, which has both received criticism and praise since its premiere. The subject of criticism has mostly been the depiction of a variety of people, especially Eichmann and Heydrich. Movies often tend to lend Nazis characters like that a demon-like aura, a natural evil of some sort that seems self-explaining. The more frightening reality is that Heydrich, Eichmann and all the other participants weren't demons but human beings, though following an inhumane, extreme ideology; believing in a "cause" that had already lead to the deaths of millions and which should lead to the death of millions more. They truly believed that what they did was right - and that they had the natural right to do it.

"Die Wannseekonferenz" excels in portraying this key event with an eerie sense of cold soberness, perfectly capturing the brutal logic of a fascist bureaucracy, where law is weaponized and everyone and everything subordinated under the doctrine of war and genocide.

No over-dramatization or -fictionalization, no unnecessary background score to paint the picture darker than it already is, and a very accurate historical portrayal of the real life personas - in my opinion the most outstanding features of this film in contrast to the other ones mentioned earlier.

The only thing that's truly missing in my opinion is some sort of historical comment other than the mention of the murder of six million jews at the end of the movie. I think, it is absolutely important to provide the audience with a context of why and when this conference took place, and more importantly of all people involved, especially the lesser known ones. It is important because the planning and execution of the holocaust spanned across all political and military branches, not just a dedicated elite - and despite the secrecy of this meeting the Nazis made sure that everyone was bound to it by complicity.

For all following generations, the holocaust constitutes a crime of unprecedented nature and scale, with terrible consequences reaching into our very present. For its planners, perpetrators and supporters, it was the fateful challenge, the biggest on the way to a racially pure, germanic European future. Imagine the horrors of a future built on the remains of millions of murdered human beings, imagine a dystopia world like that planned in what looks like a completely normal business meeting. That's what the Wannsee Conference was to Heydrich and everyone invited.