Hold Your Breath

In Hold Your Breath, mentally exhausted soldiers spend a few weeks in a sanatorium. Some seek help from professionals, while others simply wait out their time.

In this quietly observational film, the men speak about the impact the conflict has had on their lives. One soldier is haunted by the face of a Russian soldier he killed; another recounts the sight of a comrade’s severed limbs, a man he had tried to save. Some soldiers work with therapists to process these traumatic images, while others find their own ways to cope. It is not only the enemy who causes psychologically shattering experiences: one soldier describes being abandoned by a fellow soldier after he was wounded. Another shares that his wife left him while he was in a military hospital. In one respect, he notes, all these soldiers are the same: the look in their eyes. “You stare into the void. Their spirits are broken.”