‘Timestamp’ review: Doc is a powerful, fractured portrait of school days in Ukraine

Dir/scr: Kateryna Gornostai. Ukraine/Luxembourg/Netherlands/France. 2024. 125mins

Watch any documentary about schools, and you will almost certainly come away with a newfound respect for anyone who dedicates their life to teaching. But the educators in Kateryna Gornostai’s observational film about schooling in Ukraine during the ongoing war with Russia are in a different league. Interrupted by air raids, coping with damaged and sometimes entirely destroyed infrastructures, they share knowledge and passion, hugs when needed and – most crucially – a sense of normalcy and consistency.

A supremely confident work

The fragmented structure means that we don’t follow any one specific character’s journey during the film, which was shot over fourteen months in numerous locations. But there’s considerable cumulative power to these intimate glimpses of kids, from primary school tiddlers to high school graduates, all facing an uncertain future.

Gornostai returns to the Berlinale with Timestamp – the only documentary to screen in the main competition – having premiered her fiction feature debut Stop-Zemlia in Generation 14+ in 2021, where it won the Crystal Bear of the Youth Jury before a healthy festival run. Berlin juries have been particularly responsive to documentaries of late, several of which – including the last two Golden Bear winners Dahomey and On The Adamant – have dealt with themes of education, either overtly or tangentially. Whether Timestamp can follow in their footsteps remains to be seen, but this is an impressive and timely picture that should spark plenty of interest among distributors and could figure in awards conversations going forward.

It’s a supremely confident work from Gornostai which, although it does run a little long, finds a satisfying rhythm in its patchwork structure. Her most successful decisions are her boldest: the choice not to include any interviews or talking heads is one; another is a striking, dissonant avant-garde acapella score.

The director also took an approach of active non-intervention in the making of the film. It was scripted, in as much as she had ideas of scenes that she wanted to show in the picture, but nothing was recreated or staged. Without interviews or narration, it would almost be a fly-on-the-wall perspective, but for the fact that the camera – and, by extension, Gornostai and her crew – frequently become characters or participants in the film. Children lock eyes with the lens and wave, some clown for it, others regard it with suspicion. The camera – Gornostai chose to shoot on an Alexa rather than something more manoeuvrable and unobtrusive – was never going to fade into the background. But what quickly becomes clear is that children are supremely adaptable, and can take these highly unsettling and unusual times in their stride.

This is a war film but, while we hear the conflict beyond the frame and see the aftermath, the war itself is never shown. It is, however, everywhere. The film’s title comes from the protocol of applying a tourniquet – something that is now part of the curriculum taught to every Ukrainian schoolchild. The war has destroyed numerous school buildings and displaced the students and staff. One teacher walks through her burnt-out kitchen to run a zoom class, on calculating the square of binomial, from her rubble-strewn garden. A primary school in Kharkiv has relocated to a disused tunnel in a subway station. A group of very young kids sing a song containing the lines, “I hate you war…I do not want to shoot anyone.”

Students closer to graduation, meanwhile, are encouraged to think about what role they could play in the military, should the need arise. And throughout it all, the lessons are punctuated by air raid sirens. Classes file calmly to the basement shelters where ad hoc lessons or long-running teacher-student card game tournaments continue. The older students make a big, adolescent show of bravado, taking their time and dragging their heels while the teachers attempt to hustle them to safety. Which just goes to show that kids are the same the world over.