Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh’s debut feature A Picture To Remember, opens this year’s IDFA in Amsterdam, and was supported by the festival’s IDFA Bertha Fund and the European Solidarity Fund for Ukrainian Film.
One of many recent documentaries chronicling the war in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion in February 2022, it is a deeply personal, essay-style documentary that looks at war and displacement from the perspectives of three generations of women — the director, her mother (a pathologist working in the city morgue) and her grandmother, whose family lived through the upheaval of the Second World War.
The film, produced by Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon’s Real Pictures, was picked up for international sales by French-based boutique sales agency Stranger Films Sales on the eve of the festival. It has its world premiere in IDFA’s Envision Competition. IDFA runs from November 8-19.
What are the roots of the film?
It started as a project in 2019. I was shooting my mum in her workplace in the morgue for a few years. I will be honest, the film [then] was quite different from what you have seen. I had the same intentions and idea behind it, but the visual language and the form of storytelling was completely different. After the full-scale invasion, I started rethinking and to reflect on the ongoing reality and my own experience.
Where have you been making the film?
The shooting was done all in Kyiv. The post-production - the sound design and mixing we did in Berlin. My editor [Katerzyna Boniecka] is from Poland but she lives in France we were visiting her in France, we also worked online, we worked one residency in Sweden. So I travelled!
That must have been difficult with the war going on…
Absolutely. It was a very strange moment in terms of emotions and for the production. Somehow, with the coproduction that we had with LuFilms in France and Tama Filmproduktion in Germany and the support of IDFA Bertha and the Solidarity Fund, we managed to finish it in Europe.
But is it easy to think and reflect in the way you do when there is war raging around you?
The film really helped me to come through this period, especially 2022 when everything was up and down, and the world was completed changed. I was very grateful that I had a film and was able to work on it, because I think it helped save me from some emotional collapse and some depression, or whatever else can happen psychologically.
You are the film’s writer-director, the producer and you did some of the editing and shooting. Was that a very heavy burden?
Helping me all the time was the main producer, Regina Maryanovska-Davidzon [from Real Pictures]. She was with me from the beginning of 2020. Then later the coproducers came [on board].
How did you mother and grandmother react to being filmed? Were they willing collaborators?
My mum is a very open person in terms of filming. She was, I think, very happy with this attention and me coming so often to see her at her workplace. Both were aware [of the documentary]. There were a lot of jokes about making a film about us. Maybe my mother wanted to have some creative input, but I was keeping her a little bit distant.
Was it unsettling filming in the morgue?
I still see it as a place of life and death. That was what really intrigued me when I started working on the film, how the people there are facing death every day but keep themselves [going] with humour and irony but they are full of empathy too. I have become so used to the smell of the morgue. For some people, it is scary and they don’t like it l but for me, it has become something ordinary I don’t have a fear of this place but I have a lot of respect.
What are your feelings toward your home town Donetsk, which is now occupied by Russia?
I always wanted to escape. As I say in the film, I wanted to move somewhere because I know all the bad things about the city but I also really regret what has happened and is still happening. It was a very prosperous city. I just think it is all this fate and unfairness. Maybe naively, I still hope it will [one day] be back to what it was.
You feature UK singer Vera Lynn’s wartime anthem ’ We’ll Meet Again ’ at the end of the film…
My heart is really touched by this song. It not only works for the film but it so much reflects the mood and reality of how I feel now. It was so crucial for me to use this song.
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