In the spotlight
Olga Chernykh - A Picture to Remember
Film still: A Picture to Remember, dir. Olga Chernykh
A subjective film, that’s as honest as possible
Olga Chernykh’s mother was working as a pathologist in a mortuary in Kyiv. “An interesting place to capture on film,” Chernykh thought. “I started shooting there four years ago. Exactly where this project would be headed was still unclear at that stage. That was until Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022—that’s when I found a visual form for the film that eventually became A Picture to Remember.”
That was the second time that Chernykh and her family experienced this war first-hand. In 2014, the family fled from Donetsk—without her grandmother, who decided to stay put—when Russia occupied Eastern Ukraine. “The scope of the war kept growing bigger and bigger, encompassing the entire country. It was almost impossible to comprehend. To try to get a grip on the situation, I decided to tell the story from my own family’s perspective. How we have different reactions to the same circumstances. It is precisely through these personal emotions—very subjective but honest—that I hope to speak to a wider audience.”
Chernykh filmed the daily life of her mother, who is seriously ill but continues to work without complaint. Her grandmother, who still lives in Luhansk, reports on the bombings in her city over video calls. The filmmaker accompanies these accounts with archival material. “I collected endless amounts of material online. My computer holds gigabytes of downloaded photos and videos. Some of it can’t be found online anymore. For example, the fragment in which civilians flee across the street during an air raid originally came from a Russian propagandist who has since taken it offline.”
Photo: Olga Chernykh on stage after the world premiere of A Picture to Remember (Opening Film IDFA 2023)
During the production process, Chernykh continued to write and rewrite. “I had a list of memories I wanted to depict. For example, I really wanted to incorporate a memory about shame and vulnerability in the film, but I didn’t know how. Eventually, I ended up with a scene where my grandmother is ordering me to take my pants off at the beach. That scene was created in quite a late stage, using sentences that I had come up with much earlier for something completely different.”
Finding the right balance between the different visual elements took time. “I was advised to leave out the mortuary material, as they thought it would be daunting for viewers. But I decided to leave it in. I wanted to make a film that was as honest as possible, one that doesn’t hide anything. The most difficult thing about that was my mother’s illness. Especially because she did not want to talk about it. I have a scene shoot of her birthday celebration. At a later stage, during editing, I created a memory to tell the story about my mother’s illness, using the footage from that scene.”
The varying and sometimes suboptimal image quality fits the design of the film perfectly, according to Chernykh.
“It’s about memories, and memories are faded and distorted by time, never 100% objective. I didn’t want to make a film that looked like a news program. The point is that these images convey a state of mind and tell a story on an emotional level.”
According to the filmmaker, the final scene—in which the camera travels almost 800 kilometers from Kyiv to Donetsk at accelerated speed—is a painful and yet necessary climax. “It’s sort of like a road trip across the country in about two minutes. I wanted to show audiences that Donetsk is not a remote village but a big city and portray how big Ukraine is.”
Apart from this, A Picture to Remember doesn’t depict context or details that reveal anything about their place and time. “This is not a film about current events, but about human tragedy in general,” says Chernykh. “I hope that this film will still be relevant in ten, twenty years. Due to its experimental form, I initially thought that the film would only reach a limited audience, but as the opening film of IDFA 2023, we received a lot of attention. We are now busy talking about screenings at other festivals.”
By Edo Dijksterhuis
Film still: A Picture to Remember, dir. Olga Chernykh