These three documentaries, part of the Museum of the Moving Image’s slate of 38 films from 21 countries in its 2025 First Look program, feel almost like diary entries—documents of particular places and people, each with distinct tones, situations, and viewpoints.

Songs of Slow Burning Earth

Like Mstyslav Chernov’s 20 Days in Mariupol, Olha Zhurba’s Songs of Slow Burning Earth is a harrowing account of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Zhurba surveys the first two years of war, beginning in darkness with panicked calls to emergency services as people ask about the sounds of explosions. Many extended sequences unfold with no voice-over or music, simply presenting events as they happened in the moment.

On a crowded platform, evacuees desperately clamor to board a train, some pushing children toward the front. A group of elderly people waits for bread to be distributed from the back of a truck. In a muddy yard, a child plays “war,” throwing pretend grenades—until a real plane flies overhead. The boy quickly runs home for safety. Once the plane has passed, he resumes playing war. In one of the film’s most impactful moments, we watch through the windshield of a truck carrying the body of a fallen soldier as it winds through the snowy landscape of Ivano-Frankivsk. Along the roadside, mourners kneel as the vehicle passes.

The word “beauty” may seem tricky, even reductive, when describing a war documentary, yet there’s something unsettling about the film’s careful editing and still, well-composed imagery. Due to the logistics of filming over an extended period, three cinematographers—Misha Lubarsky, Vyacheslav Tsvetkov, and Volodymyr Usyk—contributed to the project. Their work is uniformly powerful. There is beauty, too, in Ukraine’s landscapes, making glimpses of wreckage all the more devastating.

According to the director in the press notes, Zhurba “didn’t conceive of any artistic decisions—even if some now exist in the finished film.” She adds, “all the choices that we now call ‘artistic’ came from this motivation to just capture historical moments.” In the current climate in America, where some of the most powerful figures seek to downplay Russia’s culpability, Zhurba’s film stands as a vital historical document.

Zodiac Killer Project

The snappy title is sure to lure curious viewers and true crime aficionados, yet Charlie Shackleton’s nonfiction piece is a purposefully dissatisfied rumination on what could have been: an abandoned documentary about the infamous, still-unsolved Zodiac Killer case of the late 1960s. Shackleton narrates with specificity and dry wit in his lulling British accent, summarizing passages from a book by Lyndon Lafferty, who claimed to know the killer’s identity, which, according to him, was never revealed due to a massive police cover-up.

As a static camera zooms slowly into different California locales, backed by eerie, ominous musical tones, Shackleton describes how his documentary would have been shot, edited, and performed by reenactors. During pre-production, Shackleton was unable to obtain the rights to Lafferty’s book, for reasons left unexplained. This lack of clearance derailed his plans, which had already been meticulously shaped in his mind. Zodiac Killer Project becomes an exorcism of the film he was unable to fully realize.

Using simple, re-created imagery and clips from other documentaries—mostly from the 2010s and 2020s—the film skewers true crime infotainment clichés and tropes while Shackleton begrudgingly acknowledges that he himself might have employed these elements as well. These include montages of grainy 1950s home movies, what he dubs “evocative B-roll” (shots of case files, an overhead interrogation lamp, a smoldering cigarette in an ashtray, or cassette wheels turning in a tape recorder), and out-of-focus actors who are seen only from behind—here nicknamed “bactors.”

The film also plays with the bending of reality—using the exterior of a library instead of a police station for convenience, or filming a more sinister-looking house rather than the actual crime scene. One of its eeriest moments is a slow zoom into a woodsy home at dusk, its windows ominously dark.

While the mix of moody shots, music, and Shackleton’s voice-over has a mesmerizing effect, the film’s summarized retelling of Lafferty’s Zodiac theory is far less compelling than Shackleton’s wry, granular observations about the craft of documentary filmmaking itself.

Elementary

Claire Simon’s observant, fluid, and engaging documentary offers a glimpse into the daily lives of students and teachers at Paris’s Makarenko Public Elementary School.

Smoothly edited and well-shot, the film captures the rhythms of the day—from the classroom hush to the jovial racket of the playground (or the children’s delighted screams as they pass under bridges on a field trip riverboat). The class assignments and lessons seem somewhat challenging—at least to this product of the American public school system. In one of the more thought-provoking moments, a diverse class engages in a civil discussion about religion.

In a selection of films that feature humankind’s brutality, Simon’s picture offers a refreshing dose of sweet idealism. Even a student performance of Rihanna’s Diamonds can make you feel hopeful—if only for a few minutes.