Maria Stoianova’s debut feature documentary Fragments of Ice, which had its world premiere at Visions du Reel in the International Feature Film Competition, is a sensitive and subtle, politically resonant assemblage of personal family archive.
It’s constructed from VHS footage her father shot when touring the West as a figure skater with Ukrainian ensemble Ballet on Ice in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and letters her parents exchanged as they pursued their dreams within the rigid limitations imposed upon them as Soviet culture workers. They aspired to the West’s consumerist lifestyle, while Russia sought to shape Ukraine into its own image, until with independence in 1992 came the shock of transition and a reckoning with economic instability and illusions. Maria’s voiceover holds the grainy impressions of an alien, capitalist world from her father’s tapes together with poetic reflections on the tides of time, and an undertow of the acute sadness that comes with hindsight in a Europe that is again catastrophically divided.
The film’s postscript dedicates the film to Viktor Onysko, originally enlisted as the editor, but killed on the war’s frontline in December 2022 while serving in the Ukrainian army after Russia’s full-scale invasion, leaving behind an eight-year-old daughter. This brings quietly devastating context to a tone at least as bitter as it is sweet. The belief that Ukraine was on an immediate road to Europe with the Soviet Union’s collapse has not arrived at a happy end, it’s all too clear — a hope that remains in the frames stuck in time, while history has again turned and darkened.
Maria’s father purchased his video camera, a rare commodity in Soviet Ukraine, from the director of the troupe he danced for in 1986, the same year that she was born. Maria appears frequently in the frame as a toddler, between the precise theatricality of ice dancing and the tangible markers, in smudgy VHS and retro chart hits, of a lost era. Beyond the domestic scenes recording family moments for posterity, the cityscapes of the USSR are barely shown, despite the skater’s numerous trips across it. He was not interested in filming the familiar contours of a place he experienced as a trap. Rather, he was obsessed with capturing the near-mythical, consumerist universe beyond the communist bloc, where price-tagged luxury was on display, there was a whiff of freedom despite KGB monitoring (“You leave the Soviet Union, cross the border, and start breathing”), and tour members were known to temporarily go missing from the bus to buy sequined sweaters from the mind-boggling array of goods at shopping malls.
Her father admits that the highly coveted opportunity for travel abroad was his motivation for becoming a figure skater, a position that granted him privileges but never pride in representing the USSR. He is propelled through a kaleidoscope of tour stops, performing in Finland, the Emirates, Australia, Greece, Hong Kong and more. Maria’s mother worked behind the scenes at the Ballet on Ice, despite having an architecture degree, and to her great chagrin was blocked from tours beyond other socialist nations.
The Ukrainian ensemble has scores of folk costumes but is considered Russian abroad, and has Russian as its working language — a telling geopolitical snapshot of Moscow’s quashing of the national identity of its declared Soviet republics. Stoianova, who also consulted the ballet’s archives, contrasts the dry, propagandistic and target-based socialist vernacular in official texts about the educational aims and show numbers of the ballet with the rich texture of real moments on the ground.
Against VHS snatches of the family’s life in all its affections, jokes, set-backs and triumphs, the turbulent sweep of wider historical changes is recounted. Entrepreneurship becomes permitted in the Perestroika climate of the late ‘80s, and Maria’s father starts a side hustle in video production. The rise of national independence movements and fall of the Berlin Wall also herald the Soviet Union’s collapse, with news events televised. This access to information is in stark contrast to the official hush around Chernobyl, which in 1986 had forced the family to leave Kyiv. As independence comes, and Ukraine’s shaky transition to capitalism brings sky-high inflation and a new unpredictability around forging material security, they leave their apartment and its disrepair for work at amusement parks in the west, where the free market brings steady pay but a sense of isolation and lack of collective purpose in self-reliance. The kitschy entertainments of Europa-park, a sprawling theme park in Germany, bring new doubts about work and cultural value — a poignant reminder that the line in Europe between dreams and nightmares is thin.
Director: Maria Stoianova
Producers: Karianne Berge, Alina Gorlova, Maksym Nakonechnyi, Carsetn Aanonsen
Cinematography: Mykhailo Stoianov
Editing: Maryna Maykovska
Sound: Vasyl Yavtushenko
Music: Anton Dehtiarov
Production companies: Indie Film (Norway), Tabor (Ukraine)
Sales: Tabor
Festival: Visions du Reel (International Feature Film Competition)
In Ukrainian, Russian, English
95 minutes
