A former Wehrmacht military barracks provides a perhaps unlikely place of solace for a group of Ukrainian children fleeing their war-torn home in Mila Zhluktenko and Daniel Asadi Faezi’s Waking Up in Silence. Screening as part of the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus programme, this documentary portrait is the second co-directed by Zhluktenko and Faezi after last year’s Aralkum and while the two films feel very different in some ways, they share a poetic sensibility in the fact of stark political issues. Here, the camera follows several children as they take in a sunny afternoon in their strange new habitat. The film deftly blends the immediacy of a lazy summer evening with past traumas and hopes for the future.
The children play together, exploring old, abandoned buildings, riding their bikes, teaching siblings German, and debating the relative sweetness of local cherries with those back in Ukraine. Zhluktenko and Faezi present the unextraordinary comings and goings – through the perfectly-judged lensing of their cinematographer Tobias Blickle – in a beautiful golden light and via the warm glow of 16mm celluloid. The effect is one of creating the milieu of a languorous coming-of-age film, but in a situation that couldn’t be further from it. The calls of swifts as they career around above the rooftops intermingle with the playful cries of children down on the ground. The extraordinary power of this coincidence is not lost on the viewer – that of a bird that virtually never lands (even sleeping on the wing), except during breeding season, having settled in nest boxes that adorn the walls of this sanctuary for others that have, only here and now, found respite from the upheaval in their lives.
At one point the camera pans along a frieze of paintings decorating the top of a wall and a girl speculates that the military scenes are depictions of soldiers helping to defend Ukraine. A friend corrects her, that these are images of an older war, and recurring cycles of conflict, migration, and renewal are brought crashing to mind. All around the base, the curbs are adorned with an apparently never-ending plea: “Putin, stop killing people.” The way it weaves around the environment, an unbroken chain, makes it seem like an enchantment, cast on the area to protect it against unwelcome invaders. It seems more potent and powerful than the fences right next to it. In a similar way, Waking Up in Silence feels like it exists within the shelter of some arcane spell – one that allows these children to be children, if just for one evening.
Directors, producers, screenplay, editing: Mila Zhluktenko, Daniel Asadi Faezi
Cinematography: Tobias Blickle
Music: Anton Baibakov, Dewey Martino
Sound design: Daniel Asadi Faezi, Andrew Mottl
Sound: Kristina Kilian
Production company: Daniel Asadi und Lotas Film (Germany), Babylon’13 (Ukraine)
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Generation Kplus)
World Sales: Square Eyes
In Ukrainian, Russian, German
18 minutes
