Notes From a Besieged City
The Setup: What You're Watching
Notes From a Besieged City is a 76-minute documentary about Kherson, Ukraine — a city that spent nine months under Russian occupation before Ukrainian forces reclaimed it in November 2022. Here's the catch: liberation didn't mean safety. The Dnieper River sits less than five kilometres away, and Russian-held territory is right across it. The shelling hasn't stopped.
This isn't a film about the past. It's a film about now — residents moving through rubble, trying to live ordinary lives while the threat remains constant. That tension between relief and ongoing dread is what the documentary keeps returning to, and it doesn't let you look away from how thin the line between survival and catastrophe actually is.
Where to Watch It Right Now
Streaming availability: Check the where-to-watch widget at the top of this page for current platform listings in your region. Documentary streaming rights shift more often than theatrical releases do — especially for festival films like this one — so the widget updates in real time. Movie OTT tracks exactly these kinds of titles, since they often surface on streaming services without much fanfare. Worth bookmarking if you're hunting for documentaries that don't get heavy platform promotion.
Runtime: 76 minutes. That brevity matters — long enough to build immersion, short enough to carry with you into the next day.
Release year: 2026
Why This Documentary Stands Apart
Most war documentaries reach for grand narration, sweeping scores, the apparatus of importance. Notes From a Besieged City does almost none of that. Instead, it focuses on what nobody really talks about in the news coverage: how mundane the danger becomes for people living inside it.
The film's restraint is where its power lives. There's a sequence — I won't spoil it — where the sound design does more work than any interview could. You hear a city that's learned to listen for specific things. Footsteps. Distant rumbles. The particular silence that means something's about to happen. That's the kind of filmmaking craft that separates a document from a documentary.
By narrowing to a single city instead of the war as a whole, the filmmakers force you to understand the conflict through faces and stories instead of maps and generals. Kherson becomes a prism. The wider war makes sense through the people who've already survived one catastrophe and are now being asked to endure something entirely different.
The Production: Big Wave Films and the Festival Circuit
Produced by Big Wave Films, the documentary premiered at the Krakow Film Festival — one of Europe's most respected documentary showcases — before moving into streaming distribution. Big Wave has built a reputation for work that doesn't flinch from difficult geographies, and this project fits squarely in that pattern.
Hard to say whether the crew did multiple visits to Kherson or compressed everything into a single intensive shoot — the film doesn't make that explicit. But the intimacy on screen suggests they earned genuine trust from the people they filmed. That's not something you fake.
What's notable is the film's place in a growing wave of Ukrainian war documentation that 2025 and 2026 have produced at a remarkable pace. Filmmakers racing to record something before conditions change again, or disappear entirely. Movie OTT's editorial team flagged this title precisely because 2026 has seen a cluster of Ukrainian-set documentaries reach international platforms — but few bring the geographic specificity and sustained focus that this one does. Specificity in documentary is almost always a virtue.
No verified box-office figures exist for this title, which tracks with its festival-circuit and streaming trajectory rather than traditional theatrical release. That's also typical for documentaries about active conflicts — the audience finds it differently, sometimes weeks after premiere.
Who Should Watch This
Anyone trying to understand the Ukraine war not as a headline but as lived experience. If you've followed the conflict through broader coverage, you'll find something here that news cycles can't provide: sustained attention to one place and the people inside it.
It's not easy viewing. But it's not exploitative either. The film respects its subjects and trusts its audience — and that trust matters. You're not being manipulated into feeling something. You're being shown something true, and your response is your own.
The 76-minute length also makes it accessible in a way that longer, more sprawling war documentaries sometimes aren't. You can sit with it in a single evening and carry it with you afterward. Movie OTT's streaming tracker will show you exactly where it's available in your region — check there first before hunting across platforms yourself.
FAQs
Is this a dramatization or a real documentary? It's a real documentary. The film is set in Kherson, Ukraine — an actual city occupied by Russian forces from early 2022 until November 2022, when Ukrainian forces liberated it. The events and people depicted are real.
Why is Kherson still under fire after being "liberated"? Geography. Kherson sits on the western bank of the Dnieper River, with Russian-controlled territory less than five kilometres away on the eastern bank. That proximity means the city remains within artillery range even after Ukrainian forces retook it.
How long is it? 76 minutes. One of the shorter feature-length documentaries on the Ukraine conflict — focused and concentrated rather than panoramic.
Where did it premiere? The Krakow Film Festival gave it early visibility before the wider streaming release.
Should I watch it alone or with others? Either way works, but it's the kind of film you'll want to talk about afterward. Don't watch it right before bed unless you're comfortable sitting with difficult thoughts.