All Roads Lead To You marks your debut in cinema, following a background in graphic design and contemporary painting. What was the initial impulse that led you to translate your personal experience into a film, and how did the transition to cinematic language take shape?
I had hardly ever worked with moving images before I started this film. My first experience was just before the full-scale invasion, when I decided to make a video project about the Tavrida highway, also known as the “highway of death”—a continuation of the symbol of Russian power, the Crimean bridge, further penetrating the peninsula. So after 24 February 2022, I carried this small handheld camera with me all the time. It was difficult to focus on the mundane, to look at it the same way as before. That’s why, to be able to look at it again and to see something new, something hiding from my eyes, I started looking through the camera, a vision device still alien to me. The filming process was intuitive and unintentional. I was looking for salvation, a hideout, or a possibility to resist, and couldn’t find that around. My “alien eye” flickered and dashed, as did my thoughts about what was happening; then it calmed (“zoomed in”) and my cognition focused along. That’s how I explain it to myself now; that’s how my diaries remember it. At first, I used the camera as an internal support device, like a crutch for my mind, to not go insane. I knew that I was going to leave, that I wouldn’t be able to come back, and I wanted to archive all those places. But also I couldn’t look at them the way I used to.
During the writing process, how did you imagine the dialogue between words and images? In what way did the writing interact with the editing process?
I had no text when I started to assemble the footage. The editing process felt to me more like a salvatory practice—it gave me a chance to return to places to which access is denied to me. I was curious to see where this method of letting thoughts wander freely might take me. I strung the videos together like beads on a thread, one after another, somehow knowing that this was the only possible order. And when the sequence was complete, words poured out of me. The writing took much less time than laying out the visual story; I guess I was unconsciously drawing it up along with the edit.
In the film, subtitles become a silent voice, accompanying the gaze and weaving a delicate thread between memory and image. What guided your choice to use them as a central narrative device?
For a long time, I couldn’t openly talk about what I lived through during the occupation. And I think I’m not the only one in this. It’s extremely difficult to claim your voice back. So I would like everyone, especially those who have a similar experience of forced displacement, to use their own voice while reading the text. It’s a lot of us, those who have never agreed and have never chosen this fate for our land.
The violence of the invasion and the russification of Crimea, alongside the domination of the patriarchal system, appear as a shadow across the images, rather than through direct representation. What motivated this approach?
The occupation of Crimea is considered successful by the Russian authorities because it was carried out quickly and effortlessly. There is no fierce fighting there now, and the resistance against the occupiers is grassroots and hidden in the shadows. Only the qırımlı (Crimean Tatars) are fighting openly. That’s why they make up the majority of Crimea’s political prisoners. If you ended up in Crimea now—or even before 2014—you wouldn’t call the presence of the Russian regime “shadowy”. The traces of its militarism and propaganda can be observed everywhere. But for sure, I tried not to look at my dear places through the lens of violence, and I avoided the direct images of the occupation. But wherever I tried to look, however I tried to hide from them, they would chase and catch me; they would still appear however hard I tried to see something else.
The film weaves together personal and collective history. How did you balance your private narrative with the urgency to convey a broader historical and cultural context?
Unfortunately, almost every Ukrainian has a family story linked to one of, if not all, the horrible events: Holodomor, dekulakization and Soviet repressions, labour camps, and deportations. I don’t think I succeeded in keeping this sort of balance—it’s even difficult to achieve in journalism now, to stay unbiased. And my film is not even an article or a research study. I wanted to appeal to numbers as little as possible, because in recent years our perception of the “quantity of atrocities” is largely deformed. Thousands, millions of murdered humans and non-humans—these are just numbers these days; it’s difficult to embody those numbers. But I also couldn’t avoid it altogether. Even if these numbers are abstract, they still prove that the horrors indeed were, they happened.
The images you filmed in the places of your childhood are mostly inhabited by anonymous figures, with the exception of your grandmother—who is also the only person with whom a brief exchange takes place in the film. What guided this choice?
The Crimea I loved is preserved only in some places, but not in the people. Almost every person close to me has left, especially the young. My parents and sister, friends, people I know, are always on the move, and we only have the rare chance to meet somewhere outside the peninsula, but thankfully, even if rare, there’s still this chance. On the other hand, my granny has never left the peninsula in my lifetime. During my last visit home, she became the most precious guide into the memories of my childhood, before the occupation. I tried to spend as much time with her as I could, knowing I would leave soon. For her, probably forever.
Though imbued with a disenchanted tone, the film closes by evoking an image of transformation and rebirth. Could you expand on this final gesture?
When we start our life, we are given the luxury of not knowing, where the fantasy doesn’t get blocked by reality, but rather the opposite—it creates alternatives. It is there, in a child’s imagination, where the lifesaving worlds—irrational, impossible, but extremely necessary—are born. When there is pain, destruction, and tragedy around oneself, then this open and utopian way of thinking becomes one’s power. It gives one a chance to imagine a different order of being. And to imagine something different means to become one step closer to this “different”.
Interview by Marco Cipollini
