‘A Picture To Remember’: IDFA Review

Dir: Olga Chernykh. Ukraine/France/Germany. 2023. 72mins

A steady stream of documentaries has emerged from Ukraine which attempt to make sense of the war that has been raging since Russia invaded the country on 24 February 2022 and beyond that to Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. Debut filmmaker Olga Chernykh adds her voice to the painful chorus by framing the conflict through her own family members, now split between Kyiv and Donetsk. An intimate, introspective film infused with effective creative touches, A Picture To Remember brings a surprisingly dreamlike quality to its exploration of the generational impact of conflict.

An intimate, introspective film infused with effective creative touches

Chernykh’s singular take on an enduringly relevant subject should be enough to spark further attention a world premiere as IDFA’s opening film, although its personal approach and meditative air may make it a niche prospect for wider theatrical distribution. A curated streamer or broadcaster would seem a more comfortable fit for an account which started out as a documentary about Chernykh’s mother Olena and her work as a pathologist in a Kyiv morgue. The first surprise attacks are caught through the use of CCTV footage from various locations around the city; flashes on the horizon, thunderous explosions, the piercing wail of car alarms at 5:30am. The grainy footage details the alarming impact, but keeps us at something of a remove.

That’s a creative decision that continues throughout the film, which rarely expands its focus to take a wider view or, besides a few harrowing sequences, get close to the violence. The war is instead filtered almost exclusively through the impact it has on Chernykh and her family, seen taking refuge in the morgue’s basement. She finds reassurance in the voice of a television newsreader who happens to be an old school friend. There is a great deal of archive footage here — the marriage of Chernykh’s parents marriage in 1989, herself as a baby, holidays with with relatives —  documenting comfortable, familiar, normal lives in Donetsk, Eastern Ukraine, where she spent her childhood before moving to the apparent security of Kyiv with her parents.

Filming in 2022, Chernykh draws immediate lines between current events and those of almost a decade previously, when Russian forces annexed Crimea and the Donbas region became largely controlled by pro-Putin separatists. Since her beloved grandmother Zoryna has remained in the family home in Donetsk, contact has been made virtually impossible and limited to limited to video calls in the past few years — including one in which they all toast Zoryna’s 80th birthday with champagne.

Taking an essayist approach, Chernykh follows the fault lines of conflict through her family’s response. Zoryna remains upbeat and pragmatic despite ailing health; Olena throws herself into her work; and Olga herself delves into her family’s generations-old relationship with war. She details her great-grandfather’s role in rebuilding Donetsk after the ravages of the Second World War, pours over the artefacts of family members living in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (which existed between 1922 and 1991) who were moulded into ‘upstanding Soviet citizens’. 

Throughout, Chernykh provides a voiceover that is at times direct, others abstract, as she works through her own feelings. “I can’t believe all of this is going to last,” she says early on, and this sense of astonishment runs throughout the film. Visually, she repeatedly blends the familiar everyday with the nightmarish realities of conflict, whether lingering on the enchanting beauty of funnel-shaped clouds only to be horrified to learn they are missile trails, or merging the human cells under her mother’s microscope into footage of drones and bombing. Sound design from Benedikt Schiefer is also evocative, recording the rumblings of a family and a country which is constantly being reshaped by external forces.