Using VHS archives, the daughter of a Soviet skating star reveals a story of personal and collective transformation.
This year, FIDOCS dedicates a showcase to contemporary Ukrainian cinema. In partnership with Docudays UA, a leading festival that, amidst the war, brings together a community of filmmakers, activists, and viewers in person in Kyiv to explore cinema's potential to represent violence, injustice, and pain, but also the forms and gestures of survival. We present three recently produced films that will be screened for the first time in Chile, and which confront the experience of a country in a state of emergency. These are works that interrogate archives, testimonies, and the staging of reality to consider what remains of humanity when it often seems that little of it remains. As the writer and physician Mikhail Bulgakov reminds us:“The tongue can hide the truth, but the eyes, never!”".
Danilo Petrovich, FIDOCS 29 programmer
Maria Stoianova is a Ukrainian documentary director and editor based in Kyiv. She studied at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Central European University, and the Sergey Bukovsky Film Program. She works with local archives and videos, and her films have been screened at festivals such as Ji.hlava IDFF, DOK Leipzig, and FIDMarseille. 'Fragments of Ice' (2024) is her first feature film.