“Marioupol, three women and a war”, on Arte: intimate portraits of torn identities

ARTE – TUESDAY DECEMBER 3 AT 10:35 P.M. – DOCUMENTARY

Since the start of the Russian invasion in Ukraine on February 24, 2022, we have known about war; at least, we know what the dozens of reports, videos and testimonies describe. We know roughly how the fighting, the bombs, the fear and the flight disrupted the daily lives of Ukrainians. We know less what these same fights, these bombs, this fear and this flight provoked deep within; how the war questioned their deep identity, built on two post-Soviet cultures that were now contradictory.

This is where Mariupol, three women and a war finds its originality. In a series of clips, like extracts from life put together, Svitlana Lishchynska shows the personal and intimate wanderings of three generations of women.

Filmed towards Russia before being demolished in the early hours of the invasion, the city of Mariupol saw the growth of these three women: “Sveta”, the director; his mother, Valya, whose VHS recording of her marriage in 1968 is shown at the opening of the documentary; and his daughter, Sasha. After the outbreak of war, Valya shows peaceful resilience, Sveta moves like an activist, Sasha flees to London, where she crosses, on the carpet of a room or on the telephone line which still connects her to his mother and his grandmother, a “existential crisis”. From her Russian culture instilled since childhood – she says several times that Russian is her mother tongue – to her construction as a person, Sasha’s entire identity is called into question.

Logbook

With a dynamic montage mixing recorded memories and present moments, images of destruction and archives, the film skillfully shows how the Soviet regime, with the “merciless whip of a totalitarian system”played a role even in infinitely intimate considerations, such as “Can love exist when there is no freedom? »

In 1998, five years after the birth of her daughter, Sveta left Mariupol for kyiv, leaving Valya to care and raise Sasha. In front of her camera, she faces reproaches from her daughter, who accuses her of having loved her badly. An introspection that pushes Sveta to question her own mother about her history and the heritage of the USSR.

The voice-over is minimal, present especially at the beginning of the film, before letting the viewer take the road into the minds and hearts of the three women; it is hardly necessary as the anxieties are personal and identifiable. The images are not always aesthetic, not always framed, as if we were witnessing family films or a logbook. Without artifice, the comparison between the times before and those of the war in Ukraine is striking. The daily life of camp and boxes at Sveta’s house, the permanent darkness of candle lighting, and the thousand questions from her daughter, too.

Valya will never return to Mariupol; his building burned down. But she seems to be taking it. “Do you feel Ukrainian? Who are you? »his daughter asks him, in the privacy of a shared mattress. “I am a human being born on this earth, I love my Mariupol. » The French title of the film says nothing about the nationality of these “three women” ; the original title, A Bit of a Stranger, says it all: “a bit of a foreigner”.