A Picture to Remember

PREMIERE: A touching essay about three generations of women in the filmmaker's family. Set between Eastern Ukraine and Kyiv, the film explores themes of internal migration, historical upheavals, war and living with it.
PREMIERE: A touching essay about three generations of women in the filmmaker's family. Set between Eastern Ukraine and Kyiv, the film explores themes of internal migration, historical upheavals, war, and life amidst it all.

The grandmother, who has stayed in Donetsk despite the bombing, takes the Facetime call somewhat awkwardly. On her birthday, daughter, granddaughter and son-in-law in Kyiv raise their glasses to the camera in a toast.
The granddaughter, filmmaker Olga Chernykh, moved with her parents to Kyiv in the 1990s after growing up in the east, where the family feels somewhat alienated, but her mother has found a good job as a pathologist. Champagne is also drunk at their place of work when the Russian invasion begins - they don't want it to fall into the wrong hands.

In A PICTURE TO REMEMBER, the footage of the war's present is supplemented with archive images and memories from the family's history. The zeitgeist of several decades, from the Soviet era to the dawn of independence and beyond, becomes tangible; the past is always part of the present.