Timestamp by Kateryna Gornostai

A film by Kateryna Gornostai

With: Olha Bryhynets, Borys Khovriak, Mykola Kolomiiets, Valeriia Hukova, Mykola Shpak

Despite the war, school life continues in Ukraine, with pupils and teachers striving to continue learning even under constant threat. The film is a mosaic of the everyday lives of teachers and students from different corners of Ukraine.

Our rate: (*)

This documentary is well-intentioned in both form and content, but never finds its breath or its artistic angle, and quickly gets bogged down in its confining concept. The idea of examining the off-screen of the war in Ukraine, of filming those who remain, of showing what is not usually seen, the media off-screen, the women in the schools, the children in the schools, the few teachers who are not on the front line, of moving from place to place to feel the pulse, but also the impact of the war, on people’s minds, as well as on buildings, is an excellent subject! The desire to tell a long story, taking its time, capturing time, showing that motifs are repeated from one region to another, portraying a country through its youth, its way of educating itself, talking about war without showing it, talking about it with the right words, captured in everyday life – here too, the formal intention can only be praised in itself. But Катерина Горностай isn’t Wang Bing, she seems constantly not to be in the right place at the right time, despite the initial sign that the director has sought to get as close as possible to the front, she seems to capture only the ordinary, or avoidance. The narrative process, highly applied and scholastic, doesn’t allow us to capture anything other than a life that continues to organize itself in spite of everything, a little out of obligation, a little with difficulty, and in a spirit essentially of resignation and, a little, anguish. But we really don’t learn much; the editing is not very dynamic, retaining moments and rushes that are stretched out, and the repetition of motifs produces no effect other than that of repetition, of the bogging down not of the conflict, but of the filmmaker, who seems to run out of material, and ends up filming side by side, juxtaposing them with no other thread than the one planned at the outset, a rigid frame that fixes the rigid. The emotion isn’t there, the technical lighting isn’t there, the artistic concept doesn’t work, the whole thing stretches on rather tirelessly and in a very predictable way, without teaching us anything about the Ukraine (except perhaps that strange scene where children, despite the atrocity of the fighting, dream of being soldiers, which reminds us a little of War and Peace, and those scenes where children learn how to handle weapons). Disappointing, on a subject of such importance, and we’re still thinking of Intercepted, available on ARTE.TV, another documentary on the ongoing Ukrainian conflict, or all of Sergei Loznitsa‘s documentaries that have struck us in the past.