Mariinka is a ghost town in the Donetsk region of East Ukraine. It was brought to the ground in the 2022 Russian invasion. In ruins and uninhabited, its collapse—infrastructural, civilizational, cultural—is brought to focus in Belgian filmmaker Pieter-Jan De Pue’s documentary Mariinka that opened the CPH:DOX on March 10 and went on to bag the film festival’s audience award.
The popular win is easy to fathom. It’s because De Pue humanises an apocalyptic reality. He grounds the hellscape of war in the personal nightmares of six of Mariinka’s denizens—forced to abandon their homes but living in the perpetual hope of a return.
Truth can indeed be stranger than fiction and way more dramatic than a film script, as we see lives of childhood friends and neighbours getting upended in inconceivable ways by the conflict. Natasha, an emerging professional boxer, becomes a frontline paramedic. Angela, who lost her parents when young, and then the sister to the war, learns to survive in the ongoing battle and creates a new job for herself amidst violence—that of transporting essential goods (and, at times, unexpectedly, even babies and fishes) on a bicycle across the two sides of the political divide.
Most heartbreaking is the way the family of four brothers in an orphanage gets fractured. Mark joins the Ukrainian army and Ruslan aligns with the pro-Russian separatists, ending up fighting on opposite sides. While Maksim has been recovering from paralysing injury in an accident, the youngest brother Daniiel (now Samuel), adopted by an American couple at the age of four, follows the war in his home country on digital screens, from a distance of thousands of miles in the new refuge, Mississippi. Ruslan, recruited in the Russian army in the offensives against Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Bakhmut, Avdiivka, Kursk, eventually went missing in Pokrovsk, supposedly dead, while Daniiel continues to wonder when he’d be able to meet his family in person. They have seen him grow into a teenaged American, well-adjusted and fluent in English, through the video calls and virtual conversations than for real.
De Pue sets up the theme of brother against brother with a poetically realised and stylized sequence right at the start of the film which underscores that in such divisive conflicts it’s the mother, in other words Ukraine, who suffers the most.
He then moves on to build his narrative on the footage he shot over ten years, during which we see his protagonists transform and mature, initially oblivious to the enormity of war but resigned as well as resentful later to the wasteland it would turn Mariinka—and their own youth—into. The director also mixes it up with some of the archival family footage of a toddler Daniiel to establish the long span of time and continuity of conflict that the film encompasses.
Natasha’s visit to the ruins of her home, mother’s grave, the boxing ring where she practised and the auditorium where she graduated is particularly poignant, with De Pue setting these visuals side by side with the footage of the happy and hopeful moments from the past. Yesterday’s wonderful memories as opposed to the havoc of the here and the now.
His camera remains a silent ally. It takes the viewers to the frontline and trenches, and close to the six resilient faces and the depth of their emotions. The intimate and immersive approach turns us into active participants in their lives rather than remaining mere passive observers.
De Pue also juxtaposes the horrors of violence at the frontline in Ukraine against the casualness of gun culture and recreational game hunting in America. A telling comment on the civilizational disparity and human irony on which pivots an estranged family and the privilege that sets the fates of brothers apart.