21/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Kateryna Gornostai’s mosaic-like, simultaneously sober and emotional observational documentary depicts school life across war-torn Ukraine

If Vitaly Mansky’s determined documentary Time to the Target [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], which world-premiered in the Berlinale’s Forum a few days ago, depicted life away from the frontlines in the westernmost Ukrainian city of Lviv, Kateryna Gornostai has opted for a more life-affirming, but no less powerful, look at how schoolchildren and teachers function across the country in Timestamp [+see also:
trailer
interview: Kateryna Gornostai
film profile], screening in competition. It is the only documentary this year, and the first Ukrainian film since Kira Muratova’s 1997 outing Three Stories, to compete for the Golden Bear.

Timestamp is Gornostai’s follow-up to Stop-Zemlia [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Kateryna Gornostai
film profile], a fiction film in which non-professional teenagers played high-schoolers, and which won the Crystal Bear at the Berlinale in 2021. Besides the overarching theme, the two pictures have a mosaic-like structure in common that immerses the viewer in a certain world, as opposed to employing a straight-forward narrative.

Shot between March 2023 and June 2024, the fully observational documentary opens with empty classrooms and school hallways. These slowly zooming or panning shots are accompanied by eerie sound design, accentuating the current liminality of such spaces. But very soon, we enter a PE class in Bucha, with DoP Oleksandr Roschyn’s handheld camera zigzagging through the crowded gym between close-ups of the students. Towns and cities with their schools and other infrastructure having suffered different degrees of damage alternate, always listed with the name of the location and its distance from the borders or the frontlines. This method helps the viewer orientate themselves, but also gives them an idea of what to expect: the places closer to the war operations are usually more heavily damaged or indeed completely destroyed. In Borodianka, a liberated city in the Kyiv region, the school is completely gone, and we see a Maths teacher delivering a Zoom lecture in her backyard. The same lady will later be spotted protesting with parents and other educators against the local government and the contractors that still haven’t rebuilt it despite donations from Lithuania.

Life for the students, ranging from the youngest kids to graduates, has a semblance of normalcy despite frequent air-raid alerts and inevitable moments of silence, with a particularly surreal scene depicting a school within a metro station. Their education is now naturally more skewed towards survival skills and patriotism, but also tolerance. A teacher in a Physics class explains structural differences between various shelters; a History professor questions his students about the erasure of Ukrainian culture in Tsarist Russia and the USSR; older boys, who may soon expect to head to the frontlines, are given detailed instructions on how to apply a tourniquet; and primary-school pupils learn about disabilities and equality between races and genders.

Throughout the film, the lighting and colouring are warm and intense, reflecting the idea that life is at its most vibrant when one is faced with mortal danger. As the documentary progresses towards online and on-site graduation ceremonies, it becomes more focused and emotional. Alexey Shmurak’s unusual, exciting avantgarde score, consisting of female a cappella voices, later veers towards a more melodic, perhaps even spiritual atmosphere, and as Gornostai juxtaposes it with dancing or gymnastics scenes, the effect is positively transcendental. Populated by hundreds of children and youngsters, Timestamp is a film that celebrates life and the promise of a future in the face of adversity.

Timestamp was co-produced by Ukraine’s 2Brave Productions, Luxembourg’s a_BAHN, the Netherlands’ Rinkel Film&Docs and France’s Cinéphage Productions. Best Friend Forever has the international rights.

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Photogallery 20/02/2025: Berlinale 2025 - Timestamp

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