The 5th Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin: The Color of Grenades

He pirouettes on the ice, is a funny bird, is allowed to go on long-distance trips with the company and films the family, as soon as he returns to Kyiv with mountains of gifts: for “Fragments on Ice”, the opening film of the 5th Ukrainian Film Festival Berlin (October 23rd to 27th), director Mariia Stoianova has assembled private video footage of her parents. Her father was a star at the legendary Ukrainian-Soviet “Ballet on Ice,” and her mother worked there as an assistant director.

Stoianova’s film essay takes a bitter melancholy look back into the transitional period of the 1980s. After the fall of communism, the folklore ensemble, which was celebrated in the former Soviet states as well as in Western and Asian countries, degraded from a celebrated, KGB-controlled cultural export hit to a neglected obsolete model.

With the end of the Soviet Union and Ukrainian independence, the already rather precarious family situation was followed by sheer existential distress. In the home movies, the father hardly shows his worries, even when he has to work in the German Europa Park in a Mickey Mouse costume.

“The Art of Being Free”: The motto of this year’s festival, which presents 13 author’s works from Ukraine as well as three short film programs (with a competition for the first time), is by no means only aimed at Putin’s invasion and the consequences of the war of aggression. “At a time when physical boundaries are tightly guarded and metaphysical ones are shifting, the festival dedicated to decolonization asks a deeply personal yet universal question: What does it mean to be free?” said program director Dariia Buteiko . Russia as a colonial power: Some film festival contributions therefore broaden the view towards Armenia and Georgia.

However, defending freedom can end in death. Viktor Onysko, the editor of “Fragments on Ice,” died in December 2022 while fighting for his country on the Eastern Front. He was also responsible for editing the anarchic media and political satire “The Editorial Office”; Director Roman Bondarchuk also dedicated his film to Onysko. Last but not least, the setting of “The Editorial Office” was ravaged by war, after the fact. Filmed in the beautifully scenic Kherson region, which was partly illegally cleared and devastated by the blowing up of the Kakhovka Dam, among other things, the surreal farce about corruption and profiteering in local politics shows what the Russian army has destroyed in real life.

“The Editorial Office” was already shown at the Berlinale. Oksana Karpovych’s documentary “Intercepted”, which is being shown as part of a program on the subject of disinformation organized jointly with the Federal Agency for Civic Education, was also shown at the film festival in February.

On the soundtrack you can hear phone calls between Russian soldiers and their families (intercepted by the Ukrainian secret service), and on the screen Karpovych shows static tableaus of their war-torn homeland. Here people staring into nothingness, there the reports of mistreatment and targeted killings of Ukrainian citizens – a juxtaposition that is shocking, especially in its contrast.

Whether a Ukrainian woman gives up her travel company to transport dead soldiers instead (“Mission 200”); In “The Basement” viewers get an idea of ​​what it’s like to endure 27 days in the school basement with 77 children; or Mariia Ponomarova accompanies the “Nice Ladies” cheerleading group, which is scattered in all directions because of the invasion: war is omnipresent in the films. How could it be otherwise?

Nevertheless, the festival simultaneously focuses attention on the country’s rich cultural and film history, on a different, quieter Ukraine. Under the title “Beyond the Shadows” a small focus is dedicated to the great film poet and rebel Sergei Parajanov. Born 100 years ago in Tbilisi, he studied in Moscow, lived in Kiev, was arrested there because of his homosexuality, among other things, and was later imprisoned in Tbilisi.

His newly restored masterpiece “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” will be shown at Silent Green on October 24th. Also shown is “The Color of Pomegranate,” Parajanov’s surrealistic homage to the Armenian poet Sayat-Nova. An archaic fresco, full of enigmatic images whose visual power, despite their strangeness, is impossible to escape.

Films that transcend reason with their visions: This brings us full circle to the grotesque “The Editorial Office,” in which the imagination also does somersaults. Except it’s a fantasy ruffled by the present and its evils.