Staying human when you are the target
An earlier version of this review was first published in Pina Piccolo’s blog on 18 July, 2025
With Kherson: Human Safari writer, photographer and now documentary filmmaker Zarina Zabrisky has created a remarkable visual ode to the Ukrainian front-line city of Kherson: its human residents (which from its original 280,000 have now dwindled down to an estimated 71,000), its lacerated buildings, the animals and plants that hang on to life in various degrees of trauma and recovery, the right bank of the Dnipro River, subjected to incessant Russian artillery and the folly of man-made flooding. It’s an ode to the unified spirit of resistance that brings all sorts of different beings together. For the people of Kherson, it’s a compendium of the myriad ways they have managed to retain their humanity, beyond the facile slogan “Stay Human” that is thrown around as an exhortation in these days of world-wide turbulence, without a concrete understanding of its meaning.
Zarina Zabrisky’s skillful and poetic camera-work guides spectators in witnessing the images of the city over the three-year span of the invasion and war, listening to the words, the silences and body language of the actual people of Kherson (rather than actors) their dismays and hopes, their dances and music interwoven at strategic points of the documentary, their reflections and aspirations. Through the combination of different art forms (speech, music, dance – the latter we then find out at the end of the documentary is performed by a local dentist), the spectator is put in a position to acquire a more holistic understanding of the scattered news, images and commentaries that have reached the Western world in these past three years of war, not counting the ‘silent war’ that started in 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and then the attempt to annex the Donbas region. Above and beyond the noise, controversies and talking heads that audiences have become accustomed to over the years, including in these days of hybrid wars – the work of acknowledged and unacknowledged pro-Putin propagandists- what emerges from this documentary is the extraordinary vitality and dignity of a people who have stayed in their city and must come to terms with their life experience, losses, separation, solidarities and betrayals, and prospects for the future. They do so by showing the audience textiles and embroideries as a memory source, by pointing out features of the natural landscape as they walk by the banks of the Dnipro River, by giving glimpses of the cultural life of the city that has moved underground, in the literal sense of the word. Among the scenes that stick with viewers is an old man confronting Russian soldiers from his wheelchair in the early days of March 2022 asking with utter indignation “Where are the Nazis? I don’t see any here!”. And later, the exact recounting of war crimes, including rapes that took place during the Russian occupation. Footage of the Russian induced flood from the destruction of Kakhovka Dam reveals the apocalyptic dimension of ecocide and recalls many of the lines from Iryna Shuvalova’s poem great water triptych .
Divided into chronologically driven chapters, each introduced by the image of a ticking clock, the documentary weaves a complex tapestry of experience, a narrative arc that includes both national history and individual past, the present and hopes for the future in spite of the crescendo of cruelty to which every individual has been subjected to by the Russian army. The relentless cruelty of the invaders culminates in the final chapter with the “human safaris” mentioned in the title, with its disturbing visualization of individual humans as drone targets from the point of view of the Russian drone operators.
The medium of interviews with a vast range of Khersonians, a majority of them women of various age, social classes, professions is used as the main tool for narrating the war. The documentary does so with the depth and pathos of so many other artistic products from Ukraine that have been subjected to the crucible of the full scale and invasion and war (I can think of a vast array of poetry from contemporary Ukrainian poets, novels like Mondgreen: Songs of Death and Love by Volodymyr Rafeyenko, documentaries like Porcelain War, by Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev).
Though viewers have witnessed a crescendo of horror ranging from the stories told by witnesses of brutal, indiscriminate killings of civilians by Russian soldiers in the initial occupation phase of the war, to the mass incineration and mass graves reserved to dead Russian soldiers as well, after liberation the relentless shelling from the opposite bank of the river that is barely one km away from the city, the death and destruction caused by blowing up of the dam and the lethal Russian deterrence from rescuing survivors, nothing can prepare them for being the targets of human safaris. Though we are accustomed to fearing nuclear weapons and mass death, being the selected target of Russian specialist delivering napalm and grenades specifically to you with the intention of killing or maiming Kherson residents as they return from work, or step out of their car to go to the doctor, or ride their bike with their child in tow, is impossible to countenance. Nevertheless, one of the interviewees admits to instinctively want to turn that drone around to target those who are targeting her, but then thinks better of it, realizing what the consequences of that action would be and refuses to plummet so low. An appeal to stay human, maintain our conscience even in dark times. Unfortunately, the scenes shown are also a sign of a form of warfare that could be normalized in the 21st century, and unlike Zarina Zabrisky, very few film makers seem to be ready to talk about it. The concluding scene shows the inner mechanism of a clock ticking, and with that image the director is driving the point of the urgency of our acting to prevent the daily massacre of a people.
The documentary is ushered in and closes on the notes and the words of the 1930’s standard “Dream a little dream of me” which may echo in our minds covered in the voices of Ella Fitzgerald, Sylvie Vartan or Eddie Vedder, I think we ought to interpret it as a call from the people of Kherson urging us to dream together and act to bring about a world free of the nightmares they are experiencing and that are shown so convincingly in this documentary.
Unfortunately, the number and consequences of drone attacks on civilians in Kherson, have not abated since the documentary’s release and Zarina Zabrisky has been pivotal in opposing the human safaris at an organizational level as well, by launching international initiatives such as global demonstrations from December 12th through 14th, to save Kherson, to be held in cities such as London, Barcelona, Ottawa, Edinburgh, Berlin. Birmingham, Malaga, Copenhagen, Vienna, Denver, New York, Dusseldorf, Sydney, Paris, The Hague. To keep updated on developments, please visit her website dedicated to these activities at https://www.humansafari.org.
Zarina Zabrisky, a US journalist, reports from the frontlines in Ukraine as a war correspondent for Byline Times (UK), Euromaidan Press (UA) and is a contributor for BBC News, CBC Radio, Voice of America, TVP World, and more. In 2023, Zabrisky co-produced and starred in an award-winning documentary Under the Deadly Skies, exposing Russian war crimes alongside veteran war correspondents John Sweeney and Paul Conroy. Her literary work appears in Paris Review, Los Angeles Review, Longreads, Guernica, Rumpus, and has earned honors, such as the 2013 Acker Award.
