With her deeply personal, impressionistic and beautifully crafted directorial debut A Picture to Remember (2023), Ukrainian filmmaker Olga Chernykh creates a cinematic site for revisiting her memories.
She cannot return to her home region of Donetsk, occupied since 2014 by Russian forces, and the cities such as Mariupol, wiped off the face of the Earth since her formative experiences there. Vividly sensorial, and politically trenchant in times of widespread war and displacement, her film explores its themes with a poetic feel for one family’s defining moments, with a modest and compact scope and running-time that never over-bets on its delicate experimentation. All this has cohered to make the essayistic doc, narrated by Chernykh, a fine choice of opening film for the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, where it is screening as a world premiere in the Envision Competition.
The first memory Chernykh shares in A Picture to Remember is of drinking champagne in the basement of the Kyiv morgue where her mother was once employed. The liquid hisses, loud over her retelling, and golden bubbles zing up past the close-up of an eye, making the intensity of this moment unmistakable. The family believed they would be safest from harm down there, on the first night of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine ordered by Russian president Vladimir Putin in February 2022. The incongruity of the decadent activity and morbid setting for this family of doctors from Donetsk, as celebratory life mixes with the proximity of death, sums up the new nonsensical and absurd reality. The surrealism of war and its ongoing assault on the certainty of concepts such as home and its orderly routines lead to many such strange reality breaks.
Chernykh sensitively pieces together black and white family photographs and grainy home movies with evocative imagery of freedoms and joys, looming threats and fear. The sky above holds birds, fireworks and, as it grows more hostile, missile trails. A trip to Mariupol with friends to go skydiving, without telling her frantic parents, is a cherished memory for the ages, even as she tries to forget the city’s subsequent decimation. Other fragments of former times (parasites observed through the microscope of Chernykh’s mother, for instance, or the smell of baked potatoes and cooking oil) are recalled with the overwhelming sensory immediacy that accompanies risk to one’s existence, and the pain of exile and nostalgia. Intricate sound design, amplifying details from this store of stories, layers the past with the present. An experimental delight in the visual and auditory possibilities of the film medium shows the consolation of creation. There is a sense that, her trust shattered by war, Chernykh has been able to re-fix her impressions in place through filmmaking, taking back control of her own impressions and history.
Chernykh and her mother conduct Zoom calls with her grandmother, who stayed in Donetsk when they moved and is now physically cut off from them, sometimes under bombardment — one of Ukraine’s countless stories of generational separation caused by the intractable political conflict and mass internal migration. We hear that her grandmother, recounting the family tales of war, execution by firing squad, and Siberian exile, also loved to repeat the story of the reconstruction of Donbas after the Second World War. Black-and-white excerpts from Soviet-era movies have a starkly more bombastic tone, including Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm: Symphony of the Donbas (1930) and M. L. Bilinski’s Donbas (1946), which show a region once glorified for its coal mining industry. Places, we understand, are always being mythologised and reconstituted, and cinema can help keep them alive in the minds of their former inhabitants, even if bombs destroy all architectural traces.
Director, Writer: Olga Chernykh
Editor: Katerzyna Boniecka
Cinematography: Yevgenia Bondarenko
Sound: Serhii Avdieiev
Sound Design: Benedikt Schiefer
Music: Maryana Klochko
Producer: Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon
Production Companies: Real Pictures, Lufilms, Tama Film Produktion
Sales: Real Pictures
Venue: IDFA (Envision Competition)
In Ukrainian and Russian
72 minutes