Typically, home movies are recorded in order to revisit landmarks or milestones in our lives. These personal recordings depict a specific time capsule of history and culture from birthdays to graduations or parties to gatherings. In the age of technology, however, these “home videos” have been replaced by cell phones, which has led to their omnipresence becoming oversaturated with meaning and spontaneity. In Maria Stoianova’s film Fragments of Ice, she uses her own family’s home video footage from 1986-1994 as a documentary material that would capture some precious moments and memories of their life along with her self-reflexive narration.
The film was presented within the International Competition at this year’s Visions du Reel. It starts with Maria’s birth coinciding with her father Misha buying his first video camera; he jokes “I don’t know which came first, Maria or the camera,” essentially comparing those two events as being equally important in his life.
From here we see Maria growing up through childhood while her parents travel around the world they leave USSR when Misha gets a job offer from touring ice ballet troupe (he used to be an ice dancer himself). Looking back at what has been filmed about my past about us I realize that it shows me Ukrainian family life before, during and after Soviet Union’ s collapse outside it.
Maria’s mother Inna joined him on these trips too but she didn’t always go because he rarely filmed there: “This is not about seeing USSR outside the frame,” says Maria early on while watching old clips where everything looks so different than now “it’s about seeing them through my parents who lived under it.” This decision itself shows (without showing) us authoritarian rule as censorship, KGB activity or country’ s fear but does not show any of them directly.
Thus we can take secret calls from ballet director with KGB ties; debates between communist and capitalist ideology; expensive sodas from vending machines. This was a world within the opposite of their own country. Through this trip around the world we see different capitalist countries but also Maria’s (as a child) naive mind that reinterprets her parents’ young adult lives.
Apart from these geopolitical aspects, we watch Maria grow up through various milestones like any other child would: getting first ice skates (although she never wanted to become one), moving into first apartment, celebrating New Year’s eve. The most memorable moment though is when Maria loses tooth. Parents use floss for tooth extraction with such tenderness and warmth while Maria’s joyousness shines through her love for them.
But after many tries it doesn’t come out thus they have wait until some time later metaphorically speaking family’s patience towards future fall down of Soviet Union which will give independence to Ukraine in 1991 but at heart there are always people who must go through everything together
The young filmmakers will be able to revisit and reinterpret its images by the conjunction of consumer grade video cameras of the late 80s/early 90s, and the millennial generation. Outside USSR but still unwilling to accept the atrocities they have faced during their travel, Maria’s Fragments of Ice records a family who erased their memory about that period.
This is where Maria recognizes and finds out another sense of her history through non-fictional “movies.” In films, stories usually happen within the frame of screen, but in Fragments of Ice or any other movie as well, what happens outside the frame affects characters’ lives even more than what we can observe with our eyes.
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