“Big stories can be told through small things.” That is how Mariia Stoianova, director of Fragments of Ice, opens her speech at the Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival in Edinburgh. The speech is pre-recorded, and it hints at what is coming in the next hour and a half: a story built entirely from 15 VHS tapes filmed from her father Mykhailo’s point of view. Mykhailo was a dancer with the Ukrainian ensemble ‘Ballet on Ice,’ which the Western world tended to see as Russian.
The film combines the sentimental value of home videos of little Mariia with a turbulent ride through a breaking point in Ukrainian history – the last years of the Soviet Union and the long-awaited arrival of independence, spanning between 1986 and 1994.
As the director explained in an interview with DTF media, she initially made a short documentary during her research and development stage at a film residency in Ukraine. Exploring the content of existing archival footage from the ‘90s, she explained that not many households owned a video camera, a luxurious item for that time and context. There was also a challenge of timing, as most footage dates from after 2000, while the main timeline of the film spans the late ‘80s and early ‘90s.
That is another reason Fragments of Ice is such a precious record of events rarely shown on screen. It displays a search for freedom that seems so far away, yet once it arrives, you freeze. This was one of the most intriguing and raw moments in the film – a portrayal of a hidden desire buried so deep that it seems as if it no longer exists.
“You leave the Soviet Union, cross the border and start breathing.” This quote from Mariia’s father lingers throughout the film, screaming to the audience how much he longed for freedom, yet back then he could only taste it briefly before returning home. Finally, in the end, “the Soviet monster is collapsing under its own weight,” bringing freedom after years of totalitarian apparatus, but leaving Mykhailo to feel simultaneously free and abandoned. Through these clashing emotions, the film lets us feel the moral collision of a post-Soviet individual.
Fragments of Ice combines a variety of techniques, from voiceovers to work with archival texts by Soviet authorities that, most of the time, “overlooked reality.”
Fragments of Ice tells a story that lingers between time and space, between life and survival, between identity and branding. Its background story once again reminds us of the horrors of a reality where the present repeats the past. Viktor Onysko, Ukrainian film editor who worked on Fragments of Ice, was killed in December 2022 during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This film is an echo of history repeating itself.
Image provided by Samzidat Eastern European Film Festival to The Student for press use.
