Rotation

A reckoning with trauma lies at the heart of Rotation.

Maryna Er Gorbach has followed up her lauded 2022 feature film, Klondike, with this powerful depiction of a young woman trying to come to terms with both the context-switching and agonising trauma of the war in Ukraine. Simple construction allows Er Gorbach and her lead actress Nadiia Karpova to mine a deep vein of emotion in a short timeframe. The film received its world premiere in Rotterdam this week as part of the newly launched Displacement Film Fund.

Rotation begins with Nadya (Karpova) sat in an apparently picturesque field, amongst sheafs of tall dry grass, where an off-screen voice asks if she managed to sleep and when she replies in the negative, offers to help. Thus begins a session of therapeutic hypnosis and Nadya finds herself back in a Ukrainian forest, in military fatigues alongside her comrades. She snaps back into the field amidst the sound of distant thudding booms, at which point the image on screen shifts into something grainier, more saturated, with the sprockets of celluloid exposed on its edges. The camera now drifts around Nadya as she wrestles both physically and emotionally with her grief.

The film’s shift in its visual language comes around a quarter of the way through, and specifically what it represents is likely to land in different ways with every viewer. On one hand it makes the action feel unreal, on another it evokes the cultural aesthetic or memory. Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi’s camera arches up into the air and twists its perspective, looking down on Nadya or, in the most striking image of the piece, presenting her sat cross-legged, as if upside down, suspended in an unnatural position. The ostensible beauty of the setting only serving to heighten the persistence of  her pain. Karpova gives a harrowing, embodied performance, channelling such anguish. Rotation taps into a fundamental pain that is at once impossible to comprehend and viscerally tangible.

Director, screenplay, editing: Maryna Er Gorbach
Cast: Nadiia Karpova, Oleksandr Piskunov
Producer: Mehmet Behedair Er, Maryna Er Gorbach
Cinematography: Sviatoslav Bulakovskyi
Music, sound: Silas Bieri
Production design: Andrii Hrechyshkin
Production companies: Protim Video Production (Turkey)
Venue: International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR) (Displacement Film Fund)
In Ukrainian
12 minutes