The press kit interview with director Maria Stoianova was carried out for NOISE FILM & TV ahead of the film's world premiere at Visions du Réel 2024. Image credit: Fragments of Ice, Maria Stoianova.

“Ice” is a recurring motif in your film. You talk about “time that seems to have frozen”, events that are being “trapped in ice”, or “the frozen kingdom [that] has many frozen characters.” This is also reflected in the film’s title. Could you elaborate on the metaphorical significance of “ice” in your film?

MS: I started from the literal meaning of the word, of course, but I moved on with it quickly because the metaphor of ice as something motionless turned out to be promising. Let’s take video recordings, for example: the reality in them looks moving, but it is frozen, once and for all. Still, interestingly enough, it’s possible to shift this reality in the editing process. When making the film, I imagined the video fragments as “fragments of ice”: they melted when getting a new impulse, a rethinking.

The metaphor of ice also works well for the late Soviet period, in which ideological schemes and official principles of social order were detached from real life, as if frozen. Of course, the collapse of the USSR set everything in motion, but let’s think of how we perceive this historical change nowadays. My parents’ generation has no particular desire to recall the past, and our generation (those born at the turn of the era) does not know how to approach it. The Ukrainian society generally has a disjointed perception of history, following a form of therapeutic forgetting associated with the experienced traumas. All the events recounted in the film took place not long ago, but to us, they are trapped in ice too. One of my tasks was to revive the memories of those times and to show their connections to the present day, or to let the ice melt.

“Official texts ignore real life while life tries to overlook official texts,” you say in voice-over. Why did you decide to delve into the archives of the Ballet when working on this film?

MS: I decided to use texts from the public archive in the film because I wanted to set the context of the late Soviet era, and to do so tangibly. The Ballet’s archives were perfect for this. Luckily, they have been preserved (in fact, we don’t have as many archives from the 1980s and 1990s preserved). They testify to the times when no one listened to the speakers at the meetings, and the speeches were written in an artificial, deliberately complicated language with numerous clichés. These texts expressed the official ideology, which was obsessed with itself, and in daily life they were perceived as something beyond truth and lies. Late Soviet people kept away from this official life as much as they could, creating sort of enclaves where their “normal” lives could take place and where the official ideology couldn’t reach.

I tried to convey the discrepancy between reality and its official description, by reading the official archival texts against the real-life footage that my father had filmed. There is no mention of this in the film, but I love how my mother describes the experience of attending official meetings in those days: “You sleep, sleep, sleep, you hear something about salaries, you wake up, you listen, you sleep again.” So it was this sleepwalking reality, with occasional splashes of important information, that I wanted to convey using the Ballet’s textual archives. Moreover, there were even elements of poeticism to some of those texts, which I also found fascinating. You can compose a poem with the ensemble’s props list.

The documentary intersperses various official notes and minutes from the meetings. In what way are they pertinent to the film’s story?

MS: The officialdom was a forced and intrusive part of late Soviet life. And people treated it with irony. They did their best to steer clear of it when it came to their private lives. This ironic distance from all things “official” shaped my parents’ views too. In particular, they had little interest in politics and saw no way of influencing it for quite a long time after the collapse of the USSR.

Your family archive is immense. How many tapes were there? What were you looking for when selecting material from these VHS tapes?

MS: I had over 30 hours of video material to work with. Roughly speaking, there were about 15 VHS tapes that my father had shot over 9 years. The tapes were gathering dust for quite a while, as we hardly ever watched them with my family. I always thought that the footage from my father’s tours was so boring. And then one day, I decided to watch it anyway and came across a recording of an argument between a “communist” and a “capitalist” on board a plane bound for Hong Kong. What a lovely scene that was! And so I watched the rest of the videos. I was thinking about how their meaning had changed—for all of us, and for my father, in particular. I also felt some invisible tension between the footage from the past and the enormous changes that had happened to us over the years (it was around 2019 at the time). So I was selecting material for the film, hoping to understand our path from point A to point B. After 2022, it became clear that we were all already at point C, and this, of course, also influenced some of my choices. Generally speaking, I would start from the material itself (and the feelings that it evoked in me) and then move toward its meanings, not vice versa. It never happened that I was looking for images to illustrate a story or a statement. Rather, the images suggested a path for me to follow.

Your father’s VHS tapes filmed abroad often feature a TV set in a hotel room and snippets of various TV programmes. Could you tell us about your decision to include them in the film?

MS: Oh yes, I like these images of TVs and TV recordings. They convey the vividness and superficiality of my father’s impressions during his trips abroad with the Ballet. Whatever he filmed in the West, he was as passionate about it as someone who was passionate about a show. It didn’t matter whether it was a TV show, an advertisement, a real performance, or numerous storefronts in a capitalist city. Interestingly enough, sometimes Dad filmed a TV set, at other times he connected a camera directly to it, so that the actual TV broadcast could be recorded on a cassette. I like how my father’s tapes mix different registers of reality: the city, the hotel room, and the media clips. I wanted to preserve this effect of indistinguishability in the film.

Your voice-over propels the narrative forward. Why did you choose to use your voice in the film, and what was your rationale for using it when narrating conversations with your parents?

I never wanted to make a film with my voice-over. But in the case of Fragments of Ice, I couldn’t find a better form for it. Indeed, the voice-over guides viewers and connects different video fragments. It speaks about memories that were captured in these videos, but even more so about those that were not recorded at all. It gives a voice to “the little Masha” who is being filmed by her family, and to “the adult Masha”, who has already arrived in the future and knows what will happen next. At some point (not right away), I decided to use my voice to narrate conversations with my parents. It wasn’t an easy decision, but in the end, I appreciated it. This way, I could express some ideas more accurately. But most importantly, it was a way to emphasise the subjectivity of the narrative. This essay film is not about reality but about what I perceived.

Your mother doesn’t remember tours that she went on with the troupe across the Soviet Union. And your father didn’t film them in the Soviet Union or in other countries of the socialist camp. What drove your father to film (or not to film)? How do these VHS tapes reflect your father’s “vision of paradise” at the time?

MS: My mother doesn’t remember her trips across the USSR because she didn’t want to remember them; my father didn’t film them because he didn’t want to. It was an uninteresting and often unpleasant part of their lives. In parallel, like many late Soviet families, my parents had an image of the West as a kind of Eldorado (a place of fabulous wealth), where all the inconveniences of Soviet life were gone, and dreams of comfort, the rule of law, and full supermarkets finally came true. By the way, the desired freedom was most often associated with the full supermarket shelves. My father had the unique opportunity to bring home video fragments of this “paradise”.

And so I tried to convey his “vision of paradise” through these videos. It’s not easy, as we see ordinary streets, ordinary hotel rooms on tapes... But we can be guided by the enthusiasm with which Dad filmed. For example, there are three cassettes from Canada, and the lion’s share of them shows the streets, filmed from the bus. Such a “vision of paradise” resembles that of a child, who has difficulty choosing things because everything is so new and impressive to them. One can also describe it as a view of a mirage—an altered image of a distant object. As long as the object remains unattainable, it looks unquestionably attractive. The question is how it changes when you get closer to it.

Your father’s filming stopped with the end of his figure skating career? Could you elaborate on this parallel and the sense of disillusionment?

My parents’ idealised view of the West was replaced by a more sober one. This happened when my father started a contract job at European amusement parks in the early 1990s. He hardly ever travelled at the time and filmed less and less. It became clear that there was another side to the shiny surface. Although my parents’ perception of the West was certainly naïve at first, they strove for change. Despite the initial illusions, they didn’t doubt what they wanted to break away from.

Your father captured a “unique show” on a plane back to the “eternal” country, as we observe in one scene. What is that “eternity” referring to?

MS: The last Soviet generation had no idea that it could be the last. Soviet people were brought up with the belief that the USSR would last forever, that the communist system was “eternal” and “unbreakable.” Many wanted the Union to collapse but hardly imagined that this could happen in real life. The paradox was that when it eventually did happen and the system suddenly collapsed, it was generally perceived as something rational. It became obvious how unsustainable and rotten the system was. So I used the word “eternal” in this scene ironically to describe the prevailing perception of the Union before 1991.

What was your rationale for using split screen when recounting the Moscow putsch events and your father’s tour in Australia?

MS: The split screen was used to convey a sense of confusion in the rapid flow of events. The images appear simultaneously, then they disappear and reappear again, and it is impossible to grasp them all. I believe that Soviet people experienced a similar difficulty comprehending the changes, as everything happened so fast. I wanted viewers to feel that confusion and incomprehension (“Wait, what was that all about?”) after watching this scene, similar to what the film’s protagonists felt.

Could you tell us about your work on the sound design and music in the film?

As for the music, I prefer minimalist solutions. For me, the music in the film was like water under a frozen river in spring: we hear a bit of it moving under the ice, and only when the ice almost melts do we hear water starting to run in full force. The music was composed by the talented Anton Dehtiarov. As for the sound of the amateur recordings, it was important for Vasyl Yavtushenko and me to make sure that they are easy to listen to. At the same time, the idea was to preserve and even enhance the authentic effect of the VHS videos. Tremendous work has been done by the sound department to get there.

Fragments of Ice recounts a story of a family and that of a nation. In a way, your family archive not only charts the trajectory of you growing up, but also the changing socio-political landscape. Could you elaborate on your choice to turn to your family’s VHS tapes and clips of your father’s rehearsals and performances, and not use other archival materials?

The idea was to show the nuanced and multi-layered political and social reality from the perspective of ordinary people and through their everyday life. As I treat private chronicles as pieces of evidence of public history, there was absolutely enough of them for the film.

In one of the scenes, you recount your parents saying that they felt “free and abandoned.” I think many people of that generation felt similarly at the time. What are your thoughts on that?

My parents’ generation entered the 1990s without much experience of independent life in the socio-political milieu. They were not ready for freedom, and they had to learn everything on their own. So the feeling of being lost was very common at the time. It was easier for my parents to adapt to the new reality, having had some experience abroad. Yet they still grappled with integrating into the new system of social relations.

In the final sequence, you say in voice-over that “the end of history” never happened. Could you elaborate on that journey, which is still ongoing?

Speaking about the “end of history”, I refer to the famous concept of Francis Fukuyama. Today, it is clear that, with the collapse of communism, the triumph of liberal democracy did not occur. Nor did the end of ideological confrontations and global wars. History goes on and on, and there will always be more ahead than behind. So I am talking about the illusory nature of “frozen history.” The phrase “the end of history has never happened” aims to remind Western viewers of the flaws in their expectations of what would ensue after the collapse of the USSR, and to remind ourselves that our past is not disconnected from our present. And while russians are stuck in their frighteningly repetitive false past, our journey —“the journey of growing up”—continues.