MARIINKA is a rarity amongst the slew of documentaries that have emerged from the war in Ukraine over the past four long years.
Most directors seek to take an aspect, a personal story or a particularly tight angle on the suffering in Ukraine. Few attempt anything as ambitious as Pieter-Jan Pue in MARIINKA, where he delves into the deeper complexities of families split by the war – families that are already damaged and divided in some way – and films from both the Ukrainian and Russian sides of the conflict.
Two families
The idea is simple, yet profound. Find two families with strong characters that are already divided. Then pull on the thread to create a much fuller vision of what this war means to Ukraine than we usually see.
And he steps outside the four walls of the war in Ukraine to view it from the outside – from one of four brothers who grew up in an orphanage in western Ukraine but were adopted by an American couple long before the war.
Pue keeps his focus tight on five key characters – Natalia, who lost her mother in a car crash when she was 13, and is now serving as a medic on the frontlines with a Ukrainian combat group. She grew up with a team of brothers – all from different fathers.
Then there are Mark and Ruslan – two of the four brothers – who are key Cain-and-Abel characters, with one serving on the Russian side in Donetsk (where he was born) and the other fighting for the Ukrainians.
Then there is Daniil – now known as Samuel (his adoptive parents blithely explain that Daniil was too difficult to pronounce) – who views the war from far away in Bible Belt USA.
Another brother, Maksim, plays a lesser role.
Their mother – a former alcoholic and addict – is still alive, but rarely seen.
Natalia’s old friend Angela also had a difficult upbringing. She, like Natalia, is from Mariinka, a small town near Donetsk now obliterated and “liberated” by Russian forces.
Angela is a smuggler/courier who crosses the frontlines daily, ignoring the lethal dangers all around, to deliver fridges, televisions, food, mail, bouquets of roses… whatever orders she has from a customer base of scribbled phone numbers and names in an old school exercise book.
She seems able to flit across lethal boundaries and through checkpoints with impunity. No one challenges her as a potential spy, or hinders her work – apart from one incident, darkly alluded to, in which a soldier raped her. The director leaves it unsaid which side it comes from.
This is unflinching filmmaking.
Caught up in war
These are young people caught up in a terrible war, risking their lives daily, or observing from afar.
While Mark, Maksim – who has lost the use of his legs after a war wound – and Ruslan fight on the front lines, Daniil (Samuel) grows up handling lethal weapons at firing ranges with his gun-toting, Bible-spouting adoptive American parents. As a tall, muscular teenager, he plays war games and dreams of joining the US Army. Ruslan tells him baldly not to do it. War is hell and brings only pain and bloodshed.
Natalia weeps silent tears after losing yet another badly wounded soldier. The director shows a man dying before our eyes. This is unflinching filmmaking.
And yet, despite the horrors, MARIINKA – as an ode to lives lost and destroyed by war, where flashbacks to old school graduation videos and earlier endeavours allow us to see the small town in mining country in better days – is poetic and gentle.
Natalia earnestly yearns for peace and for answers to why her life is so hard. Mark swears he would shoot Ruslan if he saw him on the battlefield, but seeks clerical intervention to bless his participation in the war. Seeds of doubt are placed in Samuel’s mind by Ruslan. Angela weeps at the grave of a dead friend.
Moments of bliss
There are moments of quiet bliss between the battles – Natalia and her boyfriend swimming in a lake; visions of star-studded night skies and fighting men silhouetted against the sunset that are of incredible beauty. And then brutal images of decomposing, burnt and ragged Russian war dead on an old battlefield run just before a scene of Natalia stepping naked into the currents of a waterfall – as if to wash the sins away.
MARIINKA is an important film and one that adds balance and depth to the genre of Ukrainian war documentaries.
