Still: Hold Your Breath - Vincent Sparreboom

In a sanatorium somewhere in Ukraine, soldiers who have been fighting ferociously on the frontline come for short periods of rest and therapy. Many are simply getting running repairs so they can return to battle as soon as possible. These are the subjects of Hold Your Breath*, the remarkable new film from Vincent Sparreboom which has its world premiere in IDFA’s Frontlight section.

Sparreboom has previous experience of exploring mental health issues on camera, albeit in a very different context. His earlier shorts Mama Mania (focusing on his own mother’s manic episodes) and At the Feet of My Mother (about children’s relationships with parents who haven’t been able to look after them properly) both dealt with extreme emotional vulnerability. 

“The common theme is trauma and psychological distress,” the director acknowledges a thread running through almost all his work.

In the new documentary, Sparreboom is trying to measure “the existential impact of war on a human being.” He first learned about the rehabilitation center in an article in the Dutch press. The journalist put the director in touch with his Ukrainian fixer and he made the three-day train journey to the war-torn country.

The first visit didn’t go well.

“I only made it to Kyiv but I went back home after three days because I was terrified of the air raids, the soldiers everywhere and the general atmosphere of a country at war. I just ran back and I didn’t make it to the sanatorium.”

However, he soon “gathered some courage,” returned and began to film in earnest in the spring and early summer of 2024. (He went on to make a series of trips, the most recent in May of 2026).

Ask the director what gave him the right as a Dutch filmmaker to make a movie about mentally-scarred Ukrainian soldiers and he replies: “Of course, it’s an important debate: who gets to tell whose story? But honestly, I haven’t met a single soldier who questioned my right to be there. They were simply glad that someone, anyone, was willing to really listen to what they had been through. I think, in the harsh reality of war, these kinds of ethical debates tend to fade into the background. It becomes much more basic: do I trust you? Are your intentions genuine? Asking these questions about who gets to tell whose story is, in a way, a peacetime luxury.”

He adds that being an outsider had its advantages. He noticed that Ukrainian fixers and journalists he worked with “found it very hard to meet these guys [Ukrainian soldiers] because they feel a tremendous guilt as a citizen of this country about these men who are paying the highest toll. For me as an outsider, it was a bit easier to bear the sheer weight of being there with these guys…and maybe for them, the soldiers, it was also a bit easier to talk to an outsider.”

Besides, not many other documentaries on this aspect of Ukrainian war trauma have yet been produced. “I just haven’t seen a film like this, about the psychological impact of the war on Ukrainian soldiers. I felt that if I could gain their trust and share their stories, what would be against it?”

Sparreboom adds how, "although the film is deeply rooted in the Ukrainian experience, to me it’s ultimately a universal story about war trauma. About what violence does to people, and how they struggle to live with these scars afterwards.”

 When the crew first arrived to film, a therapy programme was in place for the soldiers. “But the thing is that the programme collapsed a few days after we started shooting, so the film took a different turn.” This unexpected development shifted the focus of the documentary from the process of recovery to the soldiers’ struggle to cope with their experiences on their own.

Hold Your Breath has many close-ups of the faces of the soldiers. You can read their extreme anguish in their features. These are haunted men who simply can’t shake off the memories of the violence and pain they have witnessed and experienced. 

The film is produced by Frank van den Engel for Zeppers Film. Sparreboom first encountered the company when he did some camera work for one of their previous documentaries and stayed in touch. Van den Engel was enthusiastic about the project from the start. Sparreboom knew broadcaster HUMAN from a previous internship and they too threw their support behind him. Cinema Delicatessen is handling Dutch distribution with the release likely to be next year. 

In his visual approach, the director was inspired by French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who believed that if you look into the eyes of the other, you immediately feel a responsibility for their suffering.

“That was the goal basically, to look behind the eyes and into the faces of the people who are fighting this war and to really take it in what is the cost of their sacrifice.”

Stays at the sanatorium are deliberately kept relatively short. If the soldiers spent too long there, they would never want to go back into combat. “It is just enough to give them some kind of refreshment, a break, but not long enough really to make a change in their psychological state. It’s heart-breaking, of course, but I can also see why it is necessary. If these men weren’t [back] there, the front line would simply collapse. I think you can hardly find a soldier on the frontline who isn't severely traumatised.”

The director and his small crew would “hang around the compound for days on end,” approaching soldiers and seeing who might be willing to talk. Some were reluctant but others were curious “about these foreigners” in their midst and were “interested in sharing a more truthful picture of the reality of war compared to the glossy TV shows or commercials they see around them made by the Ukrainian army.”

Sparreboom includes many night scenes. “I also have had insomnia for quite a few years. I know how nights can be such a lonely place, an atmosphere where your struggles are even more intense. So I was particularly interested in dreams and nightmares when talking to the guys.”

The filmmakers, who always tried to take “a slow sensitive approach,” didn’t have long with their subjects. Often, the soldiers would have to go back to the front after a few days. Nonetheless, several were ready to “open up.”

“We were able to catch some really sensitive moments on camera.”

Sparreboom acknowledges that he himself needed to “decompress” after making the film. “There were definitely some difficult moments. It was heart-breaking sometimes… to witness how much these men missed their families, their ordinary life. But at the same time we had very beautiful brotherly connections as well. The warmth and love these men still carried with them, despite everything, definitely made a big impression.”

Find out more about IDFA here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund