Two girls of about ten confront each other in a room, sitting cross-legged on a faded carpet. One is raven and tousled, the other strawberry blonde with a ballerina neck. It is unclear whether they will fight or kiss; either feels reasonable. “I want to tell you that you are beautiful and intelligent”, said the most daring. “That’s all.”
An Oscar-nominated documentary about Ukrainian orphans might seem like the latest dopamine boost, but Simon Lereng Wilmont’s latest feature might just prove otherwise. Located in Lysychansk, a town in the east “20 kilometers from the front line”, as the prologue points out, A house made of shards depicts the bracing reality of children whose parents have succumbed to alcoholism, forced to live in a “temporary home” for the nine months preceding the forfeiture of parental rights. We meet Eva, whose mother doesn’t answer the phone for weeks; Sasha, whose first sip of beer was when she was eight years old; and Kolya, who Sharpies “Joker” on his forearm and refuses to wash it off. Amid their harrowing family situation, the orphanage becomes a space of community and play for toddlers through teens – a refuge, however tenuous, from a greater epidemic of addiction sweeping the region.
“Life has always been hard here,” says Marharyta Burlutska, one of the social workers who runs the home, “but the [Russo-Ukrainian] the war made things even worse. Here she does not refer to the current war against Ukraine, which broke out shortly after the end of the film (and because of which all the children and the staff of the house fled to other parts of the country), but to the ongoing conflict which, since 2014, has devastated the country and destroyed many families. Throughout the truth tale – filmed on location over a period of a year and a half during which the director made 10 week-long trips to Lysychansk – we bear witness not only to the ongoing trauma of these children, but to their enduring ability to seek out and nurture their own support networks. Less a fly-on-the-wall than a gnat on the shoulder, Wilmont’s camera follows the kids with breathtaking intimacy, stitches in Sasha’s forehead to the cigarette Kolya secretly shares with a friend older.
The women who run the shelter play several roles, the most obvious being that of caring matriarch. In the opening scene, a flinty woman in a skin-tight fuchsia tracksuit wakes the children at dawn, stroking their faces with feathers or running water over their foreheads. “I came to wake you up,” she sings to a sleepy girl in a top bunk. “You are a beautiful little thing.”
WHO doesn’t do you want to wake up this way? The glory of The house made of shards is its foregrounding of the ways in which family – and love – need not rely on biological drive or duty, need not disappear in the face of political and personal upheaval. When the tweens in the house practice their dance moves to a Ukrainian pop tune, we needn’t dwell on their abandoned toddler audience unless we focus on their wide, delighted looks. As the girls dance, a loudspeaker yells, “I’m dancing over there, proudly, alone.”
A house made of shards is available to stream online.
