Before the war reaches him, Mykola teaches physics and keeps bees. Sniper: The White Raven follows how quickly that life can be taken apart, and what a quiet man becomes once it is.
What is Sniper: The White Raven about?
The 2022 Ukrainian drama opens in the Donbas, where a schoolteacher and his pregnant wife have built a self-sufficient homestead away from the noise of the world. When militants overrun the region, that isolation offers no protection: his wife is killed and his home burned. What follows is not a straightforward revenge picture. Mykola enlists, trains as a marksman, and is shaped by an instructor who treats the discipline as a craft rather than a thrill. The film tracks the toll of that craft in close, unhurried detail — the waiting, the calculation, the cost of proximity to death that never becomes routine no matter how many times he faces it. A mentor's death partway through removes the one steadying presence in Mykola's new life, and the back half of the film sits with what he does without it.
About the cast
Pavlo Aldoshin leads as Mykola, with Maryna Koshkina, Andrii Mostrenko and Roman Semysal rounding out a cast drawn largely from Ukrainian television and stage work, giving the ensemble scenes a lived-in, unpolished register rather than a star-vehicle feel.
Context & significance
Director Marian Bushan sets the film squarely inside the war in eastern Ukraine, using the setting as lived history rather than backdrop. At 120 minutes, it moves between domestic scenes and sniper-craft sequences without leaning on spectacle, and its IMDb standing reflects a film that critics and audiences have generally rated as a solid, sober entry in the war-drama genre rather than a blockbuster one.
Watching Sniper: The White Raven on Ktime
Sniper: The White Raven streams on K-Time with both Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so viewers can watch in Farsi audio or follow the original language with Farsi text. A free K-Time account and login are all that's needed to start watching — the platform is built around a Farsi-first interface for Persian-speaking audiences wherever they are.