30/01/2024 - Olga Chernykh delivers a lyrical exploration of her heritage in the Donbass, offering up a war diary and linking it with her family’s story by way of images from their own personal archive

“Sleepless nights. War. Explosions. Characters: me, my mother, her colleagues. Location: Kiev”. Olga Chernykh didn’t think there’d be a war and she definitely didn’t think she’d spend the first night of it with her pathologist mother in the morgue where the latter works. “The safest place”. Someone produces a bottle of champagne. A Picture to Remember – screening in the Trieste Film Festival’s Documentary Competition after taking part in the IDFA – opens with the spirit running through all of her documentaries, falling somewhere between irony and aching melancholy. We see bubbles dissolving on the surface of a yellowing glass and the night sky criss-crossed with rocket trails. The Ukrainian director’s voice-over, meanwhile, is intimate, practically whispered, as if talking to herself.

Everything changed on that twenty-fourth day of February in 2022. On TV, we see the director’s childhood friend Kateryna Pavlova reading the latest tragic news updates, concluding with: “Glory to Ukraine”. Both originally hail from Donetsk. The entire Chernykh family has been displaced. “After the mass internal migration seen in 2014, those considered to be ‘peasants’ weren’t welcome in Kiev”, the director explains.  “A new but identical war is overwhelming us”, she notes with near-resignation. Only Grandma Zorya has remained, stuck, in Donetsk.

Donetsk, the city of coal and steel, and the eternal epicentre of the Russia-Ukraine War.  “No-one has ever brought the Donbass to its knees, and no-one ever will”, is the proud affirmation of that region. Olga Chernykh explains that she wanted to make a film about her mother, but then the Russian invasion turned her initial idea into a memorial recounting the testimonies of three women from three different generations. “My reality became a dream without end, with blurred boundaries, hovering somewhere between memories and real life”. And this is the exact form her documentary also takes. Chernykh connects with her ancestral past, reconstructing her heritage through family stories, photographs, and footage from their own personal archive; a family originally hailing from the Urals. We see Grandad Stasik, who was a lover of Giotto’s paintings, carving wood and laughing hard. He helped rebuild the Donbass after the Second World War. We go back in time, to executions, disease and Siberian labour camps.  There are no direct j'accuse instances linking back to the present day. What is stressed, however, is the huge deception that Soviet socialism was for the Ukrainian people. Other people’s memories link up with the director’s personal memories, back when she was a girl, such as her trip/escape with friends to Mariupol: “Today, we laugh in order to forget that it’s been wiped from the face of the Earth”.

The situation becomes tough. Donetsk is subject to bombings day and night. During a video call, Chernykh’s inveterate optimist grandma talks about how she’s replaced the glass in her windows and that her heating has gone off. She feels like a prisoner in a cage. “I can see people’s resilience crumbling, and you losing control”. But, for now, she chooses to remain and not run away.

Chernykh bases herself on a text with shades of lyricism (“trails left by rockets form elegant lines and the sky is becoming hostile, I can no longer trust it”) and depicts the situation with sleek visual accuracy: microscopic images assembled by Kasia Boniecka combine with footage of drones dropping bombs, while low-definition archive footage blends with dark, grainy, unfocused images of the present-day, captured on a mobile phone through the foggy windows of a city under siege (cinematography is entrusted to Yevgenia Bondarenko), and buoyed by Maryana Klochko’s rarefied music.

A Picture to Remember is produced by Real Pictures (Ukraine) together with LuFilms (France) and Tama Filmproduktion (Germany). Stranger Films Sales are handling international sales.