A Chronicle of Collapse Through Home Videos
Fragments of Ice is a personal and enigmatic essay on the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, experienced through one family in Ukraine. The film is based entirely on home-movie footage shot by Maria Stoianova's father, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater with the Ukrainian national ice ballet company.
The Skater's Privileged Life
Throughout the communist 1980s and into the new era, Mykhailo toured the US, Canada, the Middle East and western Europe, including Blackpool in the UK. The skaters were a privileged cultural group, encouraged by the Soviet state as diplomatic standard bearers 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.
Obsession with Western Shopping Malls
Mykhailo owned a video camera, a luxurious consumer item emblematic of his prestige. He used it largely to film western shopping malls, with which he was infatuated. As 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 finished in 1994. Mykhailo then had to get an ordinary job back in Ukraine.
A Sad, Strange Document
Stoianova's murmured memories and quotations from her father's letters home are accompanied by blurry, now poignant footage of their quaint show, and the tourist sites and shopping centres of the west. The film is innocent and transparent, yet subtly encumbered by the sadness of history. It is a strange, sad document that offers a unique perspective on the post-communist 20th century.
Fragments of Ice is on True Story from 3 July.
