Pieces of Ice review – a fascinating history of the Soviet collapse through the lens of a Ukrainian ice skater | Video

Here is a fascinating film that does not translate its meaning easily: a personal story about memory, and a mysterious story about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as experienced by a family. Ukrainebased entirely on home video footage. It is innocent and transparent, yet subtly filled with historical sadness. I can imagine Adam Curtis quoting all these words in the new synthesis of 20th century communism.

Filmmaker Maria Stoianova shows us the videos shot by her father, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater and ice dancer with the Ukrainian ice ballet company that, in the 1980s until the new season, toured the US, Canada, the Middle East and the West. Europe. (Mykhailo also played Blackpool in the UK.) Skaters were traditionally a privileged group, encouraged by the Soviet government as diplomatic standard bearers and a source of hard-earned foreign currency, but closely monitored by the KGB at all times; Maria remembers her father recounting an awkward conversation with a senior technical officer about working for them.

Mykhailo had a video camera – owning such a valuable item was a sign of the prestige associated with his work – and he used it a lot to photograph western shops, which he was attracted to. Then Gorbachev came to power and the company’s exhibition continued unchanged, which was called “Glasnost on Ice”. With the exit of Yeltsin and the turmoil in Russia, the show continued, untroubled by the destruction of the state apparatus that raised them – until the tours ended in 1994 and Maria’s father had to find a civilian job in Ukraine. Stoianova’s mumbled memories and words in her letters home are accompanied by vivid and vivid images of their famous shows, tourist attractions and western shopping malls. A wonderful, sad document.