Film-maker Maria Stoianova presents a unique documentary, Fragments of Ice, based entirely on home-movie footage shot by her father, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater with the Ukrainian national ice ballet company. The film chronicles the decline of the Soviet Union through the lens of one family's experience, blending personal memory with historical upheaval.
Father's Video Diaries from the 1980s and 1990s
Mykhailo Stoianov toured the US, Canada, the Middle East and western Europe throughout the communist 1980s and into the post-Soviet era, even performing in Blackpool, UK. As a skater, he was part of a privileged cultural group encouraged by the Soviet state as diplomatic ambassadors 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.
Mykhailo owned a video camera, a luxurious consumer item emblematic of his job's 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 rise and the ensuing Russian chaos, the show went on, eerily untroubled by the cataclysmic implosion of the state apparatus that had nurtured it, until the tours ended in 1994.
A Poignant Chronicle of Change
Stoianova's murmured memories and quotations from her father's letters home accompany blurry, now poignant footage of the show, tourist sites, and shopping centres of the west. The film is described as an enigmatic essay about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as experienced by one family in Ukraine, innocent and transparent yet subtly encumbered by the sadness of history. The documentary is available on True Story from 3 July.
