Trailer of the movie “Fragments of Ice” – watch online

A frame from the movie “Fragments of Ice”

On the eve of the premiere at the Swiss film festival Visions du Réel on April 13, the trailer of the film was released “Fragments of Ice” Ukrainian director Maria Stoyanova. The tape was dedicated to the editing director Viktor Onysk, who died in the war in 2022 and did not have time to finish work on this project.

“Fragments of Ice” is edited from amateur videos of Maria Stoyanova’s father, a figure skater of the Ukrainian ensemble “Ballet on Ice”. In addition to footage of tours and family videos shot by her father, the director supplemented the film with archival ballet videos.

The name of the film, Stoyanova said Varietyis a metaphor of the late Soviet period: “Ideological schemes and official principles of social organization in it were detached from real life, as if frozen. Of course, the collapse of the USSR set everything in motion… I wanted to revive the memories of those times and show their connection with the present or let the ice melt“.

The director started editing “Fragments of Ice” even before the full-scale invasion of Russia into Ukraine, in 2021. Initially, she wanted to explore the “vision of paradise” that her parents and other residents of the USSR had about the West, and how it changed with the changing socio-political landscape.

When the great war began in Ukraine, the film was half-edited. Then Stoyanova realized that there are two sides to the process of growing up, which her tape shows.

“One is about the ideal world you want to be in. Perhaps illusory, because what you see from afar is very attractive. But then you get closer – and it becomes deeper and more complex. The second concerns the post-colonial identity of a nation gaining independence and how we find ourselves in the process of understanding ourselves and explaining ourselves to others. How can we explain ourselves to the world without understanding who we are?” – she explains.

Editing of the tape stopped due to the death of Viktor Onysk, who died in December 2022. In the end, the editing was resumed in 2023 together with the director Maryna Maikovska, and they decided to dedicate the film to the deceased Oniska.

The producers of the film are Alina Horlova (“This rain will never end”) and Maksym Nakonechny (“Butterfly Vision”).