The ‘hat wearers’, a baptist Christian community living near the Dniester River in western Ukraine, live their simple lives. They kayak across the river in winter (can’t relate), their children play in playgrounds, they feed their children homemade bread. Another nickname for this community is the ‘Ukrainian Amish’ because they don’t use hyper contemporary technology. But despite not having things like wi-fi at home, they’re aware of the front lines a thousand kilometres away. They sent bread to ‘Heaven’, a command post where men, mostly, fight a war that’s against the former’s religion.

I assume that there are enough documentaries at this year’s Hot Docs that do things the way this does – ‘objective’ film making. Perhaps, it’s different as Dmytro Sukholytkyi-Sobchuk’s Silent Flood divides itself into three chapters, a prologue, an epilogue. Most of those segments capture the ‘hat wearing’ community faraway, one of its ‘climactic’ scenes have two rowers. There’s a lot of rowing in this documentary, the subjects here are either doing that or eating or preparing everyone’s food. Despite geopolitical troubles, the documentary follows the community’s ethos of simplicity as a deliberate choice.

“They live a normal life,” says one of the subjects in Silent Flood, a Ukrainian soldier close to the hat wearers. He says this while eating some of the homemade bread, a scene mirroring a previous one with the hat-wearers. The film captures these two separate communities with beautiful baroque lighting and shadows as days eventually turn into nights. The hat-wearers light themselves by candlelight while the soldiers also use candles, not wanting to waste resources during wartime. ‘Objective’ and observational films like this means that viewers can interpret it differently but I like this film’s through lines.