Daniil Revkovskyi and Andrii Rachynskyi

For our film “Civilians. Invasion” (2023) we used the familiar for our practice method of looking for materials through search algorithms in social networks. We collected archival videos from open sources recorded by civilians during the full-scale invasion of Russia in Ukraine.

Searching for materials by the names of cities and towns and by keywords such as "shelling", "burial", etc., we viewed several thousand videos. With the beginning of a full-scale invasion, the content on ordinary private accounts changed: staying in basements, evacuating from occupied territories, and trying to survive. On some of these channels, the last videos were uploaded in March-April 2023, and they were no longer updated. The fate of the authors of these channels is unknown.