In his second feature-length documentary after his lauded 2017 debut, The Distant Barking of Dogs, Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont revisits battle-torn Ukraine and the children whose lives have been upended by years of conflict. Set inside a shelter that temporarily houses kids whose parents can no longer care from them, A House Made of Splinters is a moving and, at times, painful portrayal of the ripple effects that war can have on its most innocent victims.
Lereng Wilmont uses a fly-on-the-wall technique, immersing himself in the world of the shelter — a grim Eastern Bloc building surrounded by muddy farmland — to the point that the children and social workers seem to barely be aware of his camera. He captures scenes of extreme emotion that come off completely naturally, allowing us to witness several defining moments in these kids’ lives, but sometimes asking us to question his approach: Were certain scenes staged or reshot for better coverage? Did the fact that the children were being documented make them act differently?
Regardless, Lereng Wilmont has chosen a compelling and heartbreaking group of kids to chronicle, focusing on three who seem to be suffering from the same predicament: their fathers are absent (some were likely killed in the war) and their mothers are alcoholics unable to act as regular parents. Sent to the shelter for a maximum of nine months, the children are then dispatched to a welcoming foster family or to a regular orphanage, or in rare cases sent back to live at home. (We never see the latter happen, and more often than not their mothers wind up disappearing from the picture.)
Perhaps to start things off optimistically, Splinters first follows a girl named Eva whose mother is too drunk to answer the phone when she calls, but whose grandmother eventually winds up becoming her legal guardian. It’s a brief happy ending in a film that has few of them, although Lereng Wilmont avoids easy miserablism by also focusing on moments of playful anarchy among the kids, as well as scenes where the social workers — all deeply compassionate women — do their utmost to make things better, or at least less bad.
The rest of the movie trails a girl named Sasha and a slightly older boy named Koyla, both of them abandoned by their moms. Sasha is shy but finds a friend in the more outgoing Polina, and Lereng Wilmont captures their play sessions as the two begin to grow closer. What’s tragic about those instances is how much they’re undercut by the grim realities these kids have been exposed to: innocent games can suddenly turn cruel, such as in one scene where a girl pretends to read another girl’s fortune, saying: “I see that your mother will die… You’ll be adopted by a foster family… They’ll make you a slave… You will drink heavily… Your kids will live in an orphanage.”
The terrible thing, as we learn later on, is that this unbroken cycle is a facet of life in the region, which has been engulfed in conflict since 2014 (and may find itself at the heart of an international conflagration should Russia invade Ukraine in the coming weeks or months). By concentrating on the most vulnerable casualties of war, Splinters reveals how the victims aren’t just those soldiers killed in battle but the children who grow up in a world filled with violence and despair.
This is particularly the case of Koyla, a bright and troubled boy who’s stuck at the shelter with his younger siblings, waiting for their mother to sober up. Forever causing trouble, but with a disarming smile and a sharp wit, Koyla is a pre-teen on the verge of going bad. He gets picked up by the police at least once for stealing, but in many ways he’s still very much a kid. At some point his mom finally shows up for a visit, and Koyla tries to keep it together until he collapses in her arms, becoming the child he needs to be.
Such scenes have a rare staying power, and one that doesn’t necessarily require the dramatic notes of Uno Helmersson’s score. Otherwise, editing by Michael Aaglund is highly effective in shaping hundreds of hours of footage into a cohesive narrative, while Lereng Wilmont displays a sharp eye as a cameraman, with certain sequences so well shot they look like they were directed. It’s a testament to his filmmaking skills that the vagaries of real life he captures manage to take on the sheer emotional force of fiction.
Director: Simon Lereng Wilmont
Producer: Monica Hellström
Cinematography: Simon Lereng Wilmont
Editing: Michael Aaglund
Music: Uno Helmersson
Production company: Final Cut for Real (Denmark)
Sales: Cinephil (Israel)
In Ukrainian, Russian
87 minutes
