On 17 July 2014, a Malaysia Airlines plane was shot down by Russian forces over eastern Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board. An investigation into a crime that still goes unpunished.
It’s springtime. The hazelnut trees are in bloom. In Brussels. In Kiev. Despite the sirens and columns of smoke darkening the sky. Training as a documentary filmmaker in the Belgian capital, Daryna Mamaisur is caught up in the invasion of her country. She wondered how to talk about it, from a distance, when cinema seemed to her the “least appropriate way to evoke the immediate danger [her] loved ones [were] facing”. Her film was born of this questioning, articulating two situations: the director takes singing and diction lessons, a way of working the language with the body to bring out the words that exorcise the internal wound. At the same time, she mounts an audio and video exchange with one of her friends still in Ukraine, who prefers to evoke birdsong, the May rains still falling on Kiev, or life with her partner, rather than the crash of the bombs. Interweaving voices and sounds that focus on the fragility of a mundane, reassuring daily life, I Stumble Every Time I Hear From Kyiv speaks hollowly but powerfully of the experience of war.
Emmanuel Chicon
Roman Liubyi
