‘Timestamp’ review: Doc is a powerful, fractured portrait of school days in Ukraine

Dir/scr: Kateryna Gornostai. Ukraine/Luxembourg/Netherlands/France. 2024. 125mins

Watch any documentary about faculties, and you’ll virtually definitely come away with a newfound respect for anybody who dedicates their life to instructing. However the educators in Kateryna Gornostai’s observational movie about education in Ukraine throughout the ongoing struggle with Russia are in a special league. Interrupted by air raids, dealing with broken and typically totally destroyed infrastructures, they share data and fervour, hugs when wanted and – most crucially – a way of normalcy and consistency.

A supremely assured work

The fragmented construction signifies that we don’t observe anyone particular character’s journey throughout the movie, which was shot over fourteen months in quite a few areas. However there’s appreciable cumulative energy to those intimate glimpses of children, from major college tiddlers to highschool graduates, all dealing with an unsure future.

Gornostai returns to the Berlinale with Timestamp – the one documentary to display screen in the primary competitors – having premiered her fiction function debut Cease-Zemlia in Technology 14+ in 2021, the place it gained the Crystal Bear of the Youth Jury earlier than a wholesome pageant run. Berlin juries have been significantly conscious of documentaries of late, a number of of which – together with the final two Golden Bear winners Dahomey and On The Adamant – have handled themes of training, both overtly or tangentially. Whether or not Timestamp can observe of their footsteps stays to be seen, however that is a formidable and well timed image that ought to spark loads of curiosity amongst distributors and will determine in awards conversations going ahead.

It’s a supremely assured work from Gornostai which, though it does run just a little lengthy, finds a satisfying rhythm in its patchwork construction. Her most profitable choices are her boldest: the selection to not embody any interviews or speaking heads is one; one other is a hanging, dissonant avant-garde acapella rating.

The director additionally took an method of energetic non-intervention within the making of the movie. It was scripted, in as a lot as she had concepts of scenes that she needed to indicate within the image, however nothing was recreated or staged. With out interviews or narration, it might virtually be a fly-on-the-wall perspective, however for the truth that the digicam – and, by extension, Gornostai and her crew – continuously develop into characters or contributors within the movie. Youngsters lock eyes with the lens and wave, some clown for it, others regard it with suspicion. The digicam – Gornostai selected to shoot on an Alexa relatively than one thing extra manoeuvrable and unobtrusive – was by no means going to fade into the background. However what rapidly turns into clear is that kids are supremely adaptable, and may take these extremely unsettling and strange occasions of their stride.

It is a struggle movie however, whereas we hear the battle past the body and see the aftermath, the struggle itself isn’t proven. It’s, nevertheless, in every single place. The movie’s title comes from the protocol of making use of a tourniquet – one thing that’s now a part of the curriculum taught to each Ukrainian schoolchild. The struggle has destroyed quite a few college buildings and displaced the scholars and workers. One trainer walks by way of her burnt-out kitchen to run a zoom class, on calculating the sq. of binomial, from her rubble-strewn backyard. A major college in Kharkiv has relocated to a disused tunnel in a subway station. A bunch of very younger children sing a track containing the traces, “I hate you struggle…I don’t need to shoot anybody.”

College students nearer to commencement, in the meantime, are inspired to consider what function they may play within the army, ought to the necessity come up. And all through all of it, the teachings are punctuated by air raid sirens. Courses file calmly to the basement shelters the place advert hoc classes or long-running teacher-student card recreation tournaments proceed. The older college students make an enormous, adolescent present of bravado, taking their time and dragging their heels whereas the lecturers try to hustle them to security. Which simply goes to indicate that children are the identical the world over.