«I have replaced the windows, Olya. The ones that got broken. It’s when the shell hit right into our yard. Olya, if you could only see the size of the shell fragment that flew into my room! At first, I was not going to do it, but it was cold, so I am happy I did it. They turned off the heating on April 1. I’ll tell you, though, all of my windows were broken. All of them! So that’s how it goes, my dear. But other than that, it’s not bad. I keep living.»
This account might give you chills, but for the millions of people living in the besieged cities, this is their everyday. I will never forget the horror when Sarajevo was under siege, and A Picture to Remember, the courageously personal essayistic documentary by Olga Chernykh, reminded me, ironically, humanity learned nothing from that. Three decades later, more and more people all over the world have been turned into living targets – in Gaza, but also Sennar and other less visible centres in Africa. As well as in Donetsk in Donbas, the Ukrainian region occupied by Russia and, since 24 February, 2022, one of the focal points of the Russian-Ukrainian war. The city where Zoryna Dyadyk, the director’s grandmother, has been living through all these months.
The lady samurai
The director spent her childhood in Donetsk, but later, she moved to the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, where her parents joined her after the large parts of the Donbas region were occupied by pro-Russian rebels in 2014. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the ensuing war not only increased the sense of distance between Chernykh and her grandmother. It made her reflect on her identity and losing ties with her parents, family, and the Donbas region. As in a reversed engineering process, her film explores these ties through a plethora of looks through different lenses. The most important one, and also the ‘fil rouge’ that ties the various aspects of the film together, is periodic video calls with her grandmother in Donetsk. Through this rare insight into the lives of the common people who are often the forgotten victims of war, she revealed her grandmother Zorya’s resilience but also dignity and pride. Just like when taking her kid granddaughter to the seaside in her 60s, she did not shy away from walking along the beach in a two-piece swimsuit; she keeps taking care of her looks while living in the war thorn Donetsk and even jokes about her «Samurai» hairdo.
Through this rare insight into the lives of the common people who are often the forgotten victims of war, she revealed her grandmother Zorya’s resilience but also dignity and pride.
The symphony of Donbas
Chernykh is also the writer and the director of photography. The camera in her hands is another protagonist in the complex web of views that make up this documentary: filming life in the Kyiv city morgue where her mother, the pathologist, is employed, specimens conserved in jars of formaldehyde, and close-ups of the bubbles in the champagne glass. Then, there are also views through other lenses, from those of a microscope searching for parasites to those of a military drone searching for targets.
These views are coupled with the archival footage from the director’s family archive and the documentary films. Among them is The Symphony of Donbas (Enthusiasm), the first sound film by the extraordinary Soviet documentarist Dziga Vertov. Vertov made this film to promote and celebrate Stalin’s Five-Year Plan, in which the Donbas region played a decisive role. Yet he also continued and extended his experiments with images to the sounds. For example, he used mobile sound equipment to record on location, incorporated factory, industrial, and other machine sounds in the film score, and deliberately created juxtaposition and misalignment of sound and image. This, of course, does not directly show in A Picture to Remember, but it is nonetheless noteworthy that the soundtrack of this film is outstanding. The popular song included in the film is used with maximum efficiency while the whole, composed by Maryana Klochko, is equivalent to the visual part.
Nostalgia
Vertov’s film has been criticised for uncritically representing Stalin’s socialism as a utopian world without conflict. As an archival material, it suits the occasion well. Other documentary material selected by director Chernykh is of a more recent origin, but it also celebrates the greatness of Donetsk, a coal-mining town that has its origin in the first years of European industrialisation, as one of the wealthiest cities in Ukraine. «A City of Million Roses and Coal,» says one of them. Embellished by being from the past, just like the recordings from the personal family archive, the cheerful documents add to the ambiguity of this essayist war documentary—a contrast to the present-day destruction but also an impulse from the past to go on.
