Additional Scenes

Ukrainian actor Pavlo Aldoshyn played the lead role in the movie Sniper. The White Raven, which depicts the events of the 2014 Russian-Ukrainian war. At the beginning of the full-scale invasion in 2022, Pavlo joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Yarema Malashchuk and Roman Khimei film the former actor who, for the first time since 2022, visits Kyiv from the frontline to act in scenes from civilian life. In the video, the soldier observes peaceful life and tries to recreate it as an actor. The shift in Pavlo’s perception of reality becomes literał: everyday civilian life now feels like fiction, requiring acting skills to experience it authentically. Additional Scenes suggests that the distinct differentiation between the military and civilians, still prevalent globally, requires reevaluation. Currently, many Ukrainian soldiers are people who previously worked in the civilian sector and joined the armed forces of their own free will. Therefore, alienating the military as representatives of power structures and showing empathy exclusively for peaceful citizens only deepens misunderstandings and hinders the building of healthy social and personal relations with people who are fighting at war. The new work by Khimei and Malashchuk sensitively draws attention to the experience of the military and reveals the conflict of identities. The film actualizes the questions, “What is normality today?” and “How can two different worlds coexist?”