Maria Stoianova’s documentary, told through archive, examines the final years of the Soviet Union and Ukraine’s transition to democracy through her father’s VHS tapes.

A champion figure skater for the Ukrainian ensemble Ballet on Ice, Maria Stoianova’s father, Mykhailo, acquired his first camera in 1986. He took it with him on the ensemble’s tours to the West and occasionally used it to document his family. Through Mykhailo’s archives, we see Stoianova grow up against the backdrop of the Chernobyl disaster, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and Ukraine’s first years of independence.

This cinematic documentary is both a touching family epic and an insightful portrait of Ukrainians in transition. In it, Mykhailo’s resentment for the collapsing regime and his hopes for prosperity and freedom that Western democracy would bring are devastatingly followed by his daughter’s realisation that, instead of remaining in the past, “history froze and caught up with us years later.”