See three of the shortlisted finalists for this year’s LUX Audience Awards this season at Scandinavia House! On March 27 we’ll be screening Intercepted, a documentary by Oksana Karpovych contrasting quiet compositions of everyday Ukrainian life since the full-scale invasion with intercepted phone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families.

What drives the people who come to your country to wage war? Intercepted is an attempt to find an answer by showing two parallel worlds. The camera registers images of destruction in unhurried shots, in which we see Ukrainian villages, towns, houses and motorways after their liberation from the Russian occupation. We look closely – not into the abyss of destruction and death, but rather at landscapes being filled again with life. This gives hope and serves to balance out the media’s normalization of horror. They are frames set against the flood of images. Throughout the film, the soundtrack forms a shocking counterpoint. We listen to the recordings of telephone conversations intercepted in 2022 by the Ukrainian Secret Service between Russian soldiers in trenches in Ukraine and their families. It is hard to decide which element is more devastating: the soldiers’ confessions of the rape, looting and brutal torture of Ukrainian civilians and prisoners of war or the (mainly) female voices from “back home” that bear witness to chauvinism and hatred, disinformation and schizophrenic propaganda. Sound and image stare each other in the face, stunned, brought together in a cinematic space.

This event has been organized by the European Parliament in partnership with Scandinavia House. The LUX Audience Award is a joint initiative of the European Parliament and the European Film Academy in collaboration with the European Commission and Europa Cinemas. It is the largest audience award worldwide and the only film prize in the world where citizens together with Members of the European Parliament — with each group weighting 50 percent — can decide who the winner will be by rating the nominated films online. The LUX Audience Award fosters dialogue and engagement between politics and the public through the medium of film. The nominated films address European values and raise awareness about some of today’s main social and political issues such as mental health, poverty, climate change, freedom of expression, gender equality, and LGBTIQ+ rights.