Fragments of Ice Review – A fascinating chronicle of the collapse of the Soviet Union through the lens of a Ukrainian figure skater | film

HAn interesting film that doesn’t give up its meaning easily: a personal piece of memory, an enigmatic essay on the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as experienced by one family in Ukraine, based entirely on home movie footage. It is innocent and transparent, yet subtly burdened with the sadness of history. I can imagine Adam Curtis adapting this in its entirety for some new collection about the post-communist twentieth century.

Director Maria Stoyanova brings us videos shot by her father, Mykhailo Stoyanov, 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 United States, Canada, the Middle East, and Western Europe. (Mykhailo even played Blackpool in the UK). The skaters were a distinct 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 with them.

Mykhailo owned a video camera – owning such a luxury consumer good was a status symbol associated with his job – and used it largely to photograph Western shopping malls, which he was fascinated with. Then Gorbachev came to power and the company’s offer continued unchanged, only now being called “Glasnost on Ice.” With the rise of Yeltsin and subsequent Russian chaos, the show continued, frighteningly unaffected by the catastrophic collapse of the state apparatus that had nurtured it – until the tours ended in 1994 and Maria’s father was forced to take a regular job in Ukraine. Stoyanova’s vague recollections and quotations from his letters home are accompanied by blurry, now poignant shots of their glitzy display, tourist sites and shopping malls in the West. A strange and sad document.