Formally ingenious and emotionally resonant, Olga Chernykh’s documentary characteristic debut highlights the ability of cinema as a guardian of reminiscences. Utilizing a wealth of archival footage to behave as a bridge between the previous and the current, the movie views the struggle in Ukraine by means of a household lens. Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 is contextualised, not as a lone occasion, however inside a historical past of aggression and generational loss.
Identified domestically because the “Metropolis of Million Roses”, Donetsk was the place Chernykh grew up in a loving household. Traces of her joyful childhood – birthday celebrations, weddings, college journeys – are imprinted throughout Chernykh’s outdated residence movies, but her diaristic voiceover casts a darkish shadow over these photos. Because the Donbas struggle in 2014, elements of Donetsk are actually Russian-occupied territories. Chernykh and her dad and mom have relocated to Kyiv; her grandmother, Zoryna, selected to remain behind. In opposition to the truth of their present separation, their moments of togetherness, which solely exist on tapes and reminiscence playing cards, are imbued with a painful fragility.
Zoryna’s personal life can be marred by gaps, expulsion and compelled migration that date again to the Soviet period. Whereas reckoning with these open wounds, the astonishingly fluid modifying offers a vital thread between private and collective histories. Like a fragile dance, the montage leaps from on a regular basis actions to the sights and sounds of struggle, such because the relentless Ukrainian TV broadcasts reporting ominous information from the entrance. The juxtaposition not solely conveys Ukrainian resilience, but in addition the sensation of dwelling between completely different timelines, a way of thinking endured by the displaced. Regardless of their new life in Kyiv, Chernykh and her household will at all times yearn for Donetsk, a metropolis whose streets they’ll solely go to by means of Google Maps.
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