‘Time to the Target’ Director on How Bruegel Influenced His Portrait of Hometown Lviv Under Russian Fire

In Vitaly Mansky’s arresting portrait of life during wartime, “Time to the Target,” he allows audiences to breathe, to absorb the smallest details and even, somehow, to laugh as his camera focuses on Lviv, in western Ukraine, a place once thought of as relatively safe. Mansky, whose films have chronicled life in today’s Ukraine and the former Soviet Union, has taken on everything from Russian gas pipelines to Putin’s grip on power in his past films before directing “Time to the Target,” this time teaming with Czech documentarians and producers Vit Klusak and Filip Remunda. Thus, the band practices, players share funny phone videos on the bus, the bass drum carrier feels the strain on his back, and there’s time to glimpse a little boy holding his dad’s military beret as the grave diggers shovel and shovel in the dirt.

Author: Leo Barraclough

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