Film-maker Maria Stoianova presents Fragments of Ice, a personal and enigmatic essay on the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as experienced by one Ukrainian family, based entirely on home-movie video footage. The film is innocent and transparent, yet subtly encumbered by the sadness of history.
Home Videos of a Soviet Ice Skater
Stoianova compiles video clips shot by her father, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater and ice dancer with the Ukrainian national ice ballet company. Throughout the communist 1980s and into the new era, he toured the US, Canada, the Middle East, and western Europe, even performing in Blackpool, UK. The skaters were a privileged cultural group, encouraged by the Soviet state as diplomatic standard bearers and a source of hard foreign currency, but closely monitored by the KGB. Maria recalls her father recounting a tense conversation with an intelligence officer about working for them.
Obsession with Western Shopping Malls
Mykhailo owned a video camera—a luxurious consumer item emblematic of his prestige—and used it largely to film western shopping malls, with which he was infatuated. After Gorbachev came to power, the company's show continued unchanged, now billed as “Glasnost on Ice.” With Yeltsin's emergence and the Russian chaos, the show went on, eerily untroubled by the cataclysmic implosion of the state apparatus that had nurtured it, until the tours finished in 1994. Then, Maria's father had to get an ordinary job back in Ukraine.
A Strange, Sad Document
Stoianova's murmured memories and quotations from his letters home accompany blurry, now poignant footage of their quaint show and the tourist sites and shopping centres of the West. The film is a strange, sad document of a bygone era. Fragments of Ice is available on True Story from 3 July.
