Vitaly Mansky's Time to Target, filmed in 2023-2024, offers what at first glance may seem like a surface-level glimpse of life in wartime Lviv, Ukraine.
At first, the film appears to offer little more than a series of disjointed images-a relentless parade of military funerals and posthumous awards ceremonies that quickly turns repetitive. One funeral is a personal tragedy; two or three evoke the weight of collective loss. By the fifth or sixth, faces blur and individual stories are swallowed by the overwhelming volume of grief. The film's relentless depiction of these processions transforms them into a wearisome carousel of death, leaving the viewer not with deeper understanding, but with a sense of emotional fatigue and a desperate plea for the cycle to end. There'll be no end.
In true Vitaly Mansky fashion, the film presents a dispassionate record of people who are, in this instance, mostly burying another people. There are a couple of dramatic moments here and there, but overall, nothing particularly groundbreaking emerges. You find yourself, even days later, trying to piece the fragmented narrative together. The streets, where onlookers stand on their knees as the funeral bus rumbles by, are undeniably impressive. The funerals seem endless, followed by a succession of posthumous awards ceremonies that also drag on, as if to emphasize that this cycle of loss and remembrance might never end.
Ultimately, Time to Target doesn't delve into hidden layers or complexities. It tells the story in its raw, unadorned form, leaving the viewer with a relentless, wearisome carousel of grief-a record of overwhelming loss.
Yet, several days after watching it, I've come to realize that perhaps it's not yet time for deep analysis. Instead, what Time to Target does is simply tell and show its story. There is nothing superficial about the mass, somber procession of military funerals; in fact, the depth of what is depicted feels profound-the emotional weight is, quite literally, two meters deep.
