Singaporean Megumi Lim’s award-winning docu captures the mundane and the menacing in Ukraine
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Singaporean documentary-maker Megumi Lim (extreme right, behind camera) with her producer Marian Prysiazhniuk interviewing police officers on patrol in Kharkiv for her documentary Night Shift.
PHOTO: MEGUMI LIM
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SINGAPORE – At around 3.30am at an isolated petrol station on the outskirts of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Singaporean documentary-maker Megumi Lim heard gunfire.
“The machine guns were popping – it was the sound of the air defence. Shahed drones were approaching the centre of Kharkiv. We checked the Telegram channels that tell you the number of drones and missiles, and where they are. We started filming, but it was scary,” says the 37-year-old.
But as time passed, she and Ukrainian producer Tetiana Burianova realised the June 2025 attack was different.
It was one of the biggest attacks on Kharkiv since the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022, Lim tells The Straits Times from her home in Kyiv, where she now lives.
The pair donned bulletproof vests and helmets and, for three hours, watched as explosions rocked the city situated just 30km from the Russian border. Drones filled the sky, followed by missiles and glide bombs released from jets.
They discussed driving to an underground metro station two minutes away, but decided that remaining in place made sense once they accounted for all the risks
Lim says: “We were in a tiny petrol station out in a field, not close to anything like a hospital or military facility that could be a target.”
That attack is shown in her debut work Night Shift, a 29-minute documentary in which she also served as cinematographer, editor and executive producer.
In 2025, the privately funded film won a clutch of prizes, including the Audience Award at the Kyiv International Short Film Festival, Best War Theme Film at the Berlin Indie Film Festival, the Platinum award for Best Short Documentary and the Silver award for Best First Time Female Director at the Independent Shorts Awards – Los Angeles.
Ambassador Kateryna Zelenko of the Embassy of Ukraine in Singapore has made plans to screen Night Shift on Feb 24, 2026, at a venue that is yet to be confirmed, on the fourth anniversary of the invasion, according to Lim.
Lim, whose mother is Japanese, attended International Community School (Singapore) from ages 13 to 18. She moved to Tokyo in 2009 to study oil painting at Tama Art University and went on to get a master’s degree in journalism from Waseda University.
After graduation, she remained there to work as a video journalist for news agency Reuters before moving to Beijing in China to work as a freelance journalist.
In 2023, she and her German husband Thomas Peter, a photographer, moved to Ukraine for various reasons.
Air defence units reacting to an attack on Kharkiv, seen in the documentary Night Shift.
PHOTO: MEGUMI LIM
China’s zero-Covid-19 policy at the time made living difficult for journalists as movement was tightly controlled, so they decided to leave. Eastern Europe made sense because Peter, born in then-East Germany, was familiar with the culture and language.
Lim reported on the 2019 Hong Kong protests and was intrigued by how the protestors took inspiration from the 2013-2014 Maidan Uprising in Kyiv.
The journalist wanted to move into documentary-making, but felt that by 2025, media fatigue about the war in Ukraine had set in. Events in Palestine were also taking centre stage in the news.
She felt that a standard video report, with its soundbites, rapid-fire interviews with experts and stock footage, would fail to land with audiences.
(From left) Producer Tetiana Burianova and director Megumi Lim filming at a petrol station in Kharkiv on June 7, during a lull as the Ukrainian city comes under one of the biggest missile and drone attacks of Russia’s full-scale invasion.
PHOTO: MEGUMI LIM
“I felt I needed to be creative with stories. The work had to be cinematic and show something that people had not seen before,” she says. She decided to document life at night after the curfew, which at the time of filming in Kharkiv began at 11pm, when only certain places and people were active.
A scene inside the basement of a children’s hospital, which acts as a bomb shelter, shown in the documentary Night Shift.
PHOTO: MEGUMI LIM
And she was determined to avoid the standard war coverage template, of “seeing Ukraine through the lens of victimhood, or just purely attacks and shooting”.
As Lim says in her director’s notes: “I pivoted to Kharkiv because of its size and proximity to the front lines. I wanted to capture the absurdity of how some aspects of war-related work have become mundane after more than three years of full-scale war, but remain dangerous and unpredictable. It was a surreal paradox I wanted to convey.”
