Here is an interesting film which does not render up its meaning easily: a personal piece about memory, and an enigmatic essay about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as it was experienced by one family in Ukraine, based entirely on home-movie video footage. It is innocent and transparent, and yet subtly encumbered by the sadness of history. I can imagine Adam Curtis quoting this in its entirety for some new compilation about the post-communist 20th century.
Film-maker Maria Stoianova presents us with video clips shot by her dad, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater and ice dancer with the Ukrainian national ice ballet company who, throughout the communist 1980s and into the new era, toured the US, Canada, the Middle East and western Europe. (Mykhailo even played 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 at all times; Maria remembers her father recounting a tense conversation with an intelligence officer about working for them.
Mykhailo owned a video camera – the possession of such a luxurious consumer item was emblematic of the prestige associated with his job – and used it largely to film western shopping malls, with which he was infatuated. Then Gorbachev came to power and the company’s show continued unchanged, only now billed as “Glasnost on Ice”. With the emergence of Yeltsin and the succeeding 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 and Maria’s dad had to get an ordinary job back in Ukraine. Stoianova’s murmured memories and quotations from his letters home are accompanied by blurry and now poignant footage of their quaint show, and the tourist sites and shopping centres of the west. A strange, sad document.