Sundance 2022: A House Made of Splinters (World Cinema Documentary Competition) | Review
Presented in the World Cinema Documentary Competition of the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters is a multilayered, poignant and heavy story sure to leave audiences heartbroken.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival is in full swing, and we are excited to be delving into this year’s rich program. Within the World Cinema Documentary Competition section, we attended the World Premiere of A House Made of Splinters, directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, a serious contender for the Audience Award, but mainly a profoundly human and moving story taking place in a Ukrainian orphanage.
A House Made of Splinters plunges us into a Ukrainian orphanage, which is home to children whose parents, as a consequence of the war or the economic crisis, have fallen into alcoholism, and sometimes violence. A small staff of social workers in the shelter is dedicated to providing comfort and protection for the children, with the goal of instilling a feeling of stability and normalcy in them.
Yet, the burden they carry is too heavy. In front of Simon Lereng Wilmont’s camera, the kids are playing, and chatting, but always end up referring to traumatic moments they have lived, such as a father who went drunk and stabbed his wife in the chest in front of his children. Indeed, what comes to the fore in the film is the heartbreaking realization that these children are perfectly lucid and aware of their parents’ failure. When talking with the social workers, they usually inquire whether they have heard from their parents and if they have quit drinking. The children’s carelessness of is always disrupted by traumatic memories, and reflections on how irresponsible their parents are. Ironically, a child stands next to a danger notice on a wall while on the phone with his mother, attempting to make sense of her rare calls and visits. As suggested by the composition of the shot: their parents are nothing but toxic to them. At the shelter, the children are dependent on their parents. Will they change? Will they even visit them or think of them? How can a child grow in such uncertainty and lack of parental care?
With poignancy and grace, the director is sharp-eyed in his observation of the children, keeping his camera pointed at their face, and capturing their random conversations in the shelter, from which one can grasp how profound and palpable the weight they bear. And as the film unfolds, the succession of direct cinema sequences become more and more heart-wrenching.
As explained in voiceover by one of the social workers, a similar pattern tends to repeat over and over again. While the children remain in the orphanage, their parents are unable to improve their condition and overcome their addiction to alcohol, resulting in the loss of parental rights. Later in life, when the children mature, they are likely to repeat the same pattern with their own children, and in some cases, bring them to the same shelter where they stayed as youngsters…
Even though the film overindulges in unnecessary emotional soundtracks, it handles this delicate subject with sensitivity and insight, and culminates in a brutally moving scene. In a gut-wrenching scene, one of the children realizes that his mother has never followed through on her promise to visit him and his siblings at the center, and has to move to another orphanage, thus abandoning his younger sister. “Our shelter is a house built of sorrow,” the voicover acknowledges.
Overall, filmmaker Simon Lereng Wilmont deftly handles a difficult subject, creating intimacy around his camera and generating a delicate, genuinely human, and incredibly emotional portrait of a cruel reality. By wrapping up the film on a short scene where one of the social workers receives a call in which one of the social workers receives a call notifying her that she will be hosting a new child, illustrating the never-ending cycle of sorrow that runs through the shelter.
Furthermore, by focusing on the tragic circumstances in which these youngsters are growing up, the film examines a symptom of broader issues plaguing Ukrainian society, accounting for the misery in which adults evolve, and are sometimes on the verge of a downward spiral.
Grade: 4.5/5
