Dad's Sneakers

"My mom went out for cigarettes 15 years ago". A new one for someone else. Sasha is small in that particular way that does not last through adolescence, a scrawn that implies gangle. The American will arrive at noon and before then the camera is as restless as anyone else.

"America where I will start a new life". It is part of the text, the gratitude speech. Repeatedly rehearsed. "Do it properly." "Don't shame us." What does Sasha want? A phone to be answered. Someone to listen. A listener for whom he will wait, Sasha needs a willing audience before he speaks.

Instead we see. Volodymr Usuk's camera is a prowling thing, informed with the same weariness and faded optimism as an auditorium seat. Hectored, bullied, harangued, harassed, scavenging biscuit from the administrative office, all is suffused with survival. Hinges squeak. Sasha speaks without speaking. Does not speak when speaking. He has his speech, but he also knows a number.

Olha Zhurba's film is rich with close observation. It is unflinching in showing us young Sasha's blinking. What is going on behind those eyes? Change approaches. To ride the bicycle is a form of freedom. "Are you ready to go?" "Are you okay?" Who could be? Who is? Everywhere there is a sense of things not just hidden but covered, of secrets, of things kept just out of reach.

This is heartbreaking. There's something ever of the melancholic in the bucolic but summer sun is rarely as bleak. Sasha's speech is limited but it has purpose. That its delivery is so often halting, halted, just adds to its impact. To jump into the cooling lake is perhaps to, for a moment, avoid dealing with having to leave.

Just as SARS-Covid-19 has had an impact on festivals, on film, the fact that this is set and shot in Ukraine will likely colour reception. I suspect given timelines that the digital post-screening interview was recorded before the Russian invasion but even without it the politics of American adoption were complex. Even as the film ends it blurs boundaries, speech over the credits in English suggests not just parallel but over-riding goals. In any circumstance one would hope all involved were well, not just those created by these fictions grounded in fact.

In that pre-recorded Q&A at 2022's Glasgow Short Film Festival Zhurba revealed the films roots in a documentary project. With non-professional actors there were elements of process including changes to rehearsal, creating something naturally naturalistic. There's a line not quite early enough to count as background whose delivery, reaction, colours the whole film. To find meaning from the absence, from the silence, even from the difference between the first interaction, ratio, is all testimony to the qualities of the construction here. While Zhurba's suggestions about the character of Mrs Carrie were interesting there is little hint and less need for them within the film. After discussion of the ending she talked about her intent to leave it sufficiently open to interpret, and to give "freedom for viewers to make their own conclusion" is a difficult task. One well done too, a moment of beauty, clarity, which invites reading.