In her first media interview published ahead of the world premiere of her debut feature “Fragments of Ice” at Swiss documentary film festival Visions du Réel, Ukrainian director Maria Stoianova tells PvNew how her film’s intention shifted after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
based entirely on archival footage shot on a camcorder by her father, a figure skater in former Soviet Ukraine, the film is voiced by the director, who was born in 1986 and takes the viewer back to the mid 80s and early 90s through her family’s story, as they experience the dissolution of the Soviet Union and of their dreams of a Western paradise.
PvNew debuts the film’s trailer below.
Stoianova started editing in 2021, before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Her father, she explains in the voice-over, filmed enthusiastically during his foreign tours with the Ukrainian Ensemble Ballet on Ice as well as moments spent with his family, but never during trips to countries from the Eastern bloc because “they didn’t interest him.”
Her initial intention, she explains, was to explore what she calls “this vision of paradise” that her parents and many in the former Soviet bloc had of the West, and how it evolved amid a changing socio-political landscape.
She was about half-way through the edit when the war broke out. That’s when she realized there were two sides to what she describes as the “growing-up process” shown in her film.
“One is about this ideal world that you want to achieve – maybe there are illusions, because what you see from a distance is so attractive. But then you get closer and it becomes deeper and more complicated.
“The other is about this post-colonial identity as a nation, as a society that gains independence – and how we are in the process of understanding ourselves and explaining ourselves to others. How can we explain ourselves to the world without understanding who we are?,” she asks.
The editing came to a halt following the death of editor Viktor Onysko, who died in combat against Russian troops in December 2022, and to whom the film is dedicated. Editing resumed last year with Maryna Maykovska (“We Will Not Fade Away”).
In her narration, Stoianova not only tells the story of her family but also reads out excerpts from the Ballet’s archive. In her director’s notes, she explains that her intention was to set the context of the late Soviet era.
“The Ballet’s archives were perfect for this. (…) They testify to the times when no one listened to the speakers at the meetings, and the speeches were written in an artificial, deliberately complicated language with numerous clichés. These texts expressed the official ideology (…). I tried to convey the discrepancy between reality and its official description, by reading the official archival texts against the real-life footage that my father had filmed,” she explains.
Inspired by her father’s job as a figure skater, the film’s title is also a metaphor, according to the director.
On the one hand, she says, she imagined the pieces of footage shot by her father as “fragments of ice,” whose reality, frozen in the images, could melt and shift during the editing process.
On the other hand, she writes in her director’s notes, “the metaphor of ice also works well for the late Soviet period, in which ideological schemes and official principles of social order were detached from real life, as if frozen. Of course, the collapse of the USSR set everything in motion (…). One of my tasks was to revive the memories of those times and to show their connections to the present day, or to let the ice melt.”
“Fragments of Ice,” which took part in numerous film development programs including IDFAcademy and DOK Leipzig Co-Pro Market, is produced by fellow Ukrainian filmmakers Alina Gorolova (“This Rain Will Never Stop,” “No Obvious Signs”) and Maksym Nakonechnyi (“Butterfly Vision”) from the Tabor Collective and is co-produced by Norway’s leading doc outfit Indie Film.
Tabor picked up Visions du Réel’s top industry award last year with their war trilogy “The Days I Would Like to Forget.”
“Fragments of Ice” will have its world premiere at Visions du Réel on April 13. The fest runs in Nyon from April 12 through April 21.
