One, Angarskaia Street

On February 24, 2022, I woke up in my Parisian apartment: Ukraine is invaded on a large scale by Russia. Ten months later, I travel across Ukraine to Dnipro, the city where I grew up, about a hundred kilometers from the front line, to try to recapture the memories of my past life.

For Rostislav Kirpičenko, travelling to make a film in Ukraine is a journey with no great figures, no great stories, it simply means taking the road back to his childhood. Deceptively simple, of course, since it is wartime and, while heading towards his past, the filmmaker travels through a present so disquieting that it is already whispering to him of just how much the future may well no longer belong to him. He fails to recognise the streets, the faces, here things are changing profoundly, and the disappearances are too heavy, too numerous. What continues to tie the filmmaker to his country? What have the people in his frames become used to that his gaze won’t be able to? Faces become a little more familiar, others remain strangers, seen from afar. The filmmaker films his country, his city, his friends with a profound distance. The film is crowded with the silhouettes of passers-by, barely seen, filmed through windows. War is there, in the very way of looking. But even so, what is close to the surface, to the sound of the air-raid sirens, to the muffled rumours of disappearances, is also a deep attachment to things as they were, to these inhabited ruins. The mechanical voice chosen by the filmmaker to accompany us on his journey speaks without saying, screening off an emotion that cannot be erased. An immense sadness, a world upended, love that persists through this “everything-has-changed”. What now remains is to find the right balance.
 
Clémence Arrivé Guezengar