21/02/2023 - BERLINALE 2023: The director talks about the autobiographical elements in her atmospheric period film and the way it relates to modern-day Ukraine

(© Tonya Noyabrova)

We spoke to Ukrainian director Tonya Noyabrova, who, after two short films and her comedic debut feature, Hero of My Time [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (2018), has just presented her second feature in the Berlinale’s Panorama. Do You Love Me? [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Tonya Noyabrova
film profile] is focused on the struggles of a 17-year-old girl as she begins her adult life amidst the turbulent times of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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Cineuropa: What strikes us at first glance is that Do You Love Me? is not simply a period movie, but does indeed look like a film made during Perestroika or the early 1990s. Was this your desired effect?
Tonya Noyabrova: It was extremely important to recreate this atmosphere as authentically as possible and to avoid fakeness. For me, it is really off-putting to watch movies with an obviously imitated historical environment. So I approached each frame and each detail in the set design very carefully, such as the clothes, accessories and chewing gum, for example. I wanted the audience to smell the smells and to hear the sounds of their own childhood.

The Berlinale synopsis defines the film as semi-autobiographical. What made you want to go back to your adolescence?
I needed to say goodbye to my childhood and to some illusions. The urge to do so came when I started realising that time was melting away in my memory and the images were disappearing. I wanted to stop the process, at least for a moment, and preserve what was left. The idea emerged five years ago, and since then, I have rewritten the script many times. It is not an entirely autobiographical story, because at the time of Perestroika, I was seven years old. I fictionalised a few moments from the traumatic divorce of my parents, while bringing in elements typical of the 1980s and 1990s so that I could create a universal coming-of-age plot to which more people would relate. I was interested in the process of growing up internally against the backdrop of the collapse outside – something which happened in Ukraine with the fall of the Berlin Wall and which is also happening currently. That’s one reason why the film might seem particularly relevant now.

One could indeed draw a parallel between the divorce in the family and the disruption on a political level between countries and territories back then and now; it is a subtle political implication that provides food for thought. Was this double-layered narrative a conscious goal?
It came out rather intuitively – something must have been absorbed from the galvanising air outside. The film was conceived before the invasion but, in this current situation, takes on a double meaning. It also reflects the atmosphere of the scary, unknown future, the one that was waiting for us in the 1990s and the even scarier prospects we have now.

How did you cast Karyna Khymchuk in the central role? She is very organic in her vulnerability. Even her hairstyle brings to mind the plumage of a baby bird that’s just fallen out of the nest.
She is not a professional actress. I had cast another curly-haired and more experienced girl before Karyna, but in the process of looking for supporting actors, she popped up with a video on Facebook in which she was sporting very long hair and introduced herself as a professional handball player who would like to try out acting. Just before the casting, she cut her hair short, and when I saw her photo with this clumsy, funny look, I thought she would be the right choice for the main character. Afterwards, we spent a year in rehearsals, and I had a lot of pressure from the team during that period because they did not believe it would work. But both I and Karyna resisted, and we made it in the end.

The final line in the film, when this older friend of the parents tells Kira that beautiful girls should not work and invites her into his car, opens up a very broad perspective of what her life could potentially turn into.
In the initial version of the script, she accepts and gets into his car, perhaps to pursue an easy life. But during the editing, I thought that I could not do that to my Kira and decided to leave the ending open – it’s like a hint that becoming an adult confronts you with complex choices.

Why did you make it a co-production with Sweden?
We finished shooting four days before the war, almost one year ago. And when the world around us collapsed, we found ourselves without any resources. We desperately needed co-producers, and luckily, I met the guys from Common Ground Pictures and Film i Väst at Cannes. They liked the first editing draft a lot and helped us with the post-production.