Zhanna Ozirna’s ‘Honeymoon’ Explores War and Intimacy at FIFF

At the 40th edition of Switzerland’s Fribourg International Film Festival, socially and politically engaged cinema remains at the heart of the lineup. Among the titles in international competition is “Honeymoon,” Ukrainian filmmaker Zhanna Ozirna’s chamber drama about a newly married couple trapped in their apartment as Russian forces close in on the Kyiv region at the start of the 2022 invasion.

Ozirna’s debut feature, which is having its Swiss premiere at FIFF, takes an intimate approach to a subject that has often been documented through frontline footage and reporting. Instead of depicting combat directly, she keeps the harsh realities of war largely offscreen, turning her attention to what happens inside a relationship when fear and the instinct to survive take over every aspect of daily life.

The project grew out of testimonies Ozirna encountered in the early days of the war. Friends had endured weeks in hiding and one story in particular stayed with her of a family forced to crawl across their apartment floor to avoid being seen from outside.

“That image stayed with me,” Ozirna says. “To crawl for days just to stay alive felt like something that goes against basic human dignity.”

Rather than build the film around a family’s experience, she drew from multiple accounts, shaping them into the story of a single couple. “I wanted to keep it minimal,” she says. “For me, the war was more of a frame, the real subject was the relationship. I was interested in how people behave when they lose their sense of safety and dignity, and how relationships change in that kind of situation.”

That approach also shaped the film’s ethical framework. In Ukraine, Ozirna notes, there is an ongoing debate about how to portray a war that is still unfolding. She was determined not to exploit trauma, and one early decision was to avoid casting actors who had lived under occupation themselves.

“We spoke with some very strong actors who had gone through it,” she says. “But they told us it would be re-traumatizing. So we understood very clearly that we could not ask that of them.”

Her refusal to show Russian soldiers onscreen was equally deliberate. Their presence is conveyed entirely through sound, be it their footsteps, distant blasts, the constant sense of threat. While partly a practical decision for a production with a limited budget, it was also a conceptual one.

“I didn’t want to show the enemy in a simplified way, and I also didn’t want to humanize that violence in a way that felt false to me,” she says. “So they remain like a ghost, something always near, something you fear, something that can return at any moment.”

As the film continues to screen internationally, Ozirna is acutely aware of the gap between those living through the war and audiences encountering it from afar. Though global attention has shifted, daily life in Ukraine remains defined by uncertainty. “People abroad live their lives and that’s normal,” she says. “But for us, it’s different. Sometimes I can’t plan even a few days ahead.”

For Ozirna, fiction offers a way to bridge that gap, allowing audiences to focus on the human cost of war in its most intimate form. “There are many documentaries showing what is happening,” she says. “But fiction can explore something else by looking at intimacy, relationships, and how people really feel.”