Visions du Réel 2024: Fragments of Ice | Review
Maria Stoianova revisits her family home video archives, producing a self-reflexive meditation of a family traveling across the world whilst subtly under the eye of the Soviet Union.
Home movies are often documented to revisit monuments or milestones in our lives. From birthdays to graduations or parties to gatherings, these home videos depict a specific time capsule in both history and culture. In the age of technology, these “home videos” are replaced with cell phones, causing an omnipresence to the point of oversaturation in meaning and spontaneity. In Maria Stoianova’s film Fragments of Ice, home video documents her Ukrainian family throughout the running time from 1986 to 1994, capturing precious moments and memories of their lives with Maria’s self-reflexive narration.
Presented in the International Competition at this year’s Visions du Reel, the film begins with Maria’s birth in conjunction with her father, Misha’s purchase of his first video camera. Misha jokes, “I don’t know which came first, Maria or the camera”, slyly comparing the two as the same milestone. From here, we see Maria’s childhood and her parents travel from the USSR to around the world as part of Misha’s job in a touring ice ballet troupe. Maria meditates upon the footage’s content of her past: the life of a Ukrainian family before, during, and after the collapse of the Soviet Union through their travels outside of it.
Through Misha’s job as a member of a Ukrainian ice ballet troupe, Maria’s mother, Inna, and Maria join him traveling around the world from Canada to Greece to England and many more. But early on, Maria states that her father rarely filmed in the Soviet Union. This is the main thesis of the film; how we see the Soviet Union outside the frame, but additionally through the family who lived under it. In fact, this precise decision shows us (without explicitly showing us) the authoritarian rule as some sort of censorship, KGB activity, or fear from the country, instead of outright depicting it. Whether it be secret calls from the ballet director with ties of the KGB, debates between communist and capitalist ideology, or as simple as expensive sodas from vending machines, the footage encompassed a world opposite of their home country. Their ventures across the globe show the difference between the capitalist and communist countries, where we see Maria’s (as a child) oblivious nature, recontextualized into new found meanings and discoveries of her parents’ young adult lives.
Besides the geopolitical undertones, we do see Maria grow through her different milestones like any child would. Getting her first ice skates (although she never wanted to become one), moving into their first apartment, New Year’s celebration, and more. But one defining moment is a simple event of Maria’s tooth extraction. With such grace and family affection, the parents use floss to extract Maria’s loose tooth, while Maria’s joyful spirit is apparent due to her parent’s love. Maria’s fearless and cheerful demeanor is ready for the tooth’s removal, but fails to fall out after many tries, resulting them to wait. One can metaphorize the family’s patience of the upcoming downfall of the Soviet Union, giving independence to Ukraine in 1991, but at the heart of these countries, are the people and families who must persevere through it all.
The intersection of the consumer grade video grade cameras of the late 80s/early 90s, and the millennial generation will allow younger filmmakers revisit and recontextualize its images. Maria’s Fragments of Ice shows a family unwilling to accept the atrocities through their travels outside the USSR, while suppressing their memories of this time. It’s in this non-fiction where Maria captures and realizes a new meaning of her past, thanks to home “movies.” In movies, the story is typically within the frame of the screen, but in Fragments of Ice, the world outside the frame impacts Maria and her family just as much, if not more, than what we see.
