In front of the church, which now serves as their refuge, two Ukrainian women are discussing when the dull sound of an explosion breaks out.
"Do you think it was a mortar? At least the weather is nice today."
Welcome to "Mariupolis 2", the documentary by Lithuanian director Mantas Kvedaravičius, presented in special screening at the 75th Cannes Film Festival.
This new film is the sequel to a first project, shot in 2014 and 2015 in the eastern port city of Ukraine, already plagued by violent clashes between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatists.
Last April, Mantas Kvedaravičius was arrested by the Russians as he tried to leave the city, only to be found murdered.
His film, completed in record time by his fiancée, Hanna Bilobrova, and added to the festival's lineup at the last minute, is a rare and raw testimony to life suspended in wartime.
Photo from the film "Mariupolis 2", presented at the 75th Cannes Film Festival.
© Cannes Film Festival
Buried in the basement of a church under the bombs
"Mariupolis 2" exposes the daily life of Ukrainian refugees in the basement of a church as the muffled sound of bombardment rumbles around them.
These ghosts spend most of their time in this improvised dormitory, most often in the dark, without electricity.
During the rare moments of calm, men and women come out of their lair and get busy clearing the rubble, cooking food on a fire on the ground, or trying to recover food from the rubble.
In this new routine, made of waiting, only the destruction evolves, gaining ground and always threatening a little more to fall on the group.
Every day, these souls gather for a common prayer.
"It's God and not these walls that keep us alive. Go and see the mass grave of the theater or the factory", asserts one evening one of them, in reference to the theater of Mariupol, bombarded on the 16th March with civilians inside, as well as at the Azovstal metallurgical plant besieged by Russian forces.
"We didn't choose the church, it chose us", explains Hanna Bilobrova, fiancée of Mantas Kvedaravičius and co-director of the film.
"It was our second stop, and after that stop we couldn't move. We were literally stuck there with this community."
Rejection of "war fiction"
In addition to the power of its subject, "Mariupolis 2" stands out for its form, which is more like a sequence of sequences than a documentary in the traditional sense of the term.
Through the window, Mantas Kvedaravičius' camera scans the hypnotic columns of smoke that caress the horizon.
From a distance, the director films the group holed up in his basement, through long static shots, as if to illustrate this life now devoid of landmarks.
Sometimes, he captures testimonies, like that of this sick father, whose voice rises, in the darkness of the dormitory, to explain that he has lost his wife and cannot take care of his young son.
Other members of the group express, in small touches, reflections or evoke their life before.
But at no time does the film dig into the personal journeys of these men and women.
Throughout, "Mariupolis 2" maintains its raw and radical approach.
"We are used to seeing war as a fiction. Even in the television news, it is presented to us as a fiction. It is a representation. Nobody really shows us the people who live under the war", underlines Hanna Bilobrova, defending the approach of his deceased companion.
"Cinema allows you to move the narrative. What matters is how you look at things. And Mantas has always looked at us, the people, with great freedom and without preconceived ideas."
Shot in a few weeks then edited in a month, "Mariupolis 2" allows the viewer to experience, in near real time, the ordeal of Ukrainian civilian prisoners of war.
A remarkable and moving feat, which, presented at Cannes, honors the memory of its late director in the best possible way.
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