What does authenticity sound like? Audio is a medium that promises intimacy, real voices, unvarnished honesty. But it’s an illusion: hours of editing and sleight-of-hand often go into even straightforward-sounding stories, as producers manipulate interviews to construct a simple, sellable narrative from the strands of someone else’s life.
Very few nonfiction works which focus on the current war in Ukraine written by non-Ukrainians effectively capture the microcosms of small villages where Ukrainian resilience and perseverance in Russian aggression’s face brews a clever resourcefulness in the village’s inhabitants.
In the aftermath of Russian bombings, torture and mass executions, these are the Ukrainian towns that are refusing to give in, doggedly trying to piece their lives back together.