For middle-aged Ukrainian Svitlana Lishchynska, or Sveta, who grew up in Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, the war mentality provoked by Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 feels like a throwback to Soviet times. Times when you were taught to ‘love the Motherland, endure hardships and hate the enemy.’
Back then, Soviet propaganda proclaimed the army a force for peace. Now the Russian army, once again brandishing Soviet insignia, is destroying the country, the city and even the building that Sveta grew up in.
Even worse, the situation confronts Sveta with her own Soviet mentality, “the fear of not being like everyone else,” as she describes it. This mentality continued after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Once Sveta embraced the new reality of living in independent Ukraine, she switched to speaking Ukrainian instead of Russian, studied Ukrainian culture and history, and moved from the Russian-speaking eastern region of Ukraine to the capital, Kyiv. She wanted to be just as Ukrainian – if not more so – as everyone else.
Meanwhile, she left her young daughter with the child’s grandmother. And this is where Svitlana Lishchynska’s documentary – her first feature film after many years working for Ukrainian television – is most interesting. Combining war footage and home videos, it interweaves the historical and cultural vicissitudes of one family with the wider geopolitical relations between Russia and Ukraine.
For grandma, the Soviet Union was a fact of life. She lived in ‘the best country in the world’ and, for all her hatred of Putin, she still seems to only partially identify with Ukraine. Most of all she loves Mariupol, the eastern port city which, of all the major Ukrainian cities, has been most heavily shelled by Russian troops. Her daughter, and our director, Sveta was born in the Soviet Union, but tried – and failed by her own account – to transition into an exemplary Ukrainian citizen. She could never fully shake off the stifling Soviet mentality with which she was raised, and that left her with “a legacy of disappointment, poverty and the Russian language.”
And where one might expect Sveta’s own daughter Sasha to take the logical next step and fully embrace Ukrainian national identity, Sasha felt abandoned by her mother after having been left with her grandmother in Mariupol, and instead embraced the regional Russian culture and language. “I can speak Ukrainian, but I dream in Russian,” says Sasha. Of the three women, she actually seems the most shaken by the full-scale Russian invasion – which beforehand she vehemently denied was going to happen – as if two parts of her own identity were at war with each other.
And there is a fourth generation in this female family tree, Sasha’s young daughter Stefi. Whether she will be taught to speak Ukrainian or Russian is a question which still directly reflects the Soviet heritage and Ukrainian nationalism that previous generations had to navigate.
This way, the family reflects much broader issues of identity, nationality, culture and homeland that have helped shape Ukrainian politics even before the Russian invasion. Issues which are both regional and generational. And issues which will still need to be addressed when this war is finally over.
A Bit of a Stranger is a bit of a strange title, though. If I had to guess, it could refer to how Sveta and Sasha often seem to have become strangers to each other, ever since Sveta left Sasha with her grandmother. But it could also refer to how Sasha feels like a stranger everywhere – including London, where she flees with Stefi as a war refugee. Or how granny has become something of a stranger, having been born in a country, the Soviet Union, that no longer exists. Or, maybe most poignantly, how Sveta herself always appears to feel like a stranger in a strange land, a former Soviet citizen who cannot seem to find her inner freedom.
A freedom, she believes, she needs to be able to truly love. And thus to be a better mother. “Can there be love where there is no freedom?” she asks at one point, “Can there be freedom where there is no love?” Having had her individuality crushed by the Soviet Motherland, she now has to rediscover her individuality as a mother in Ukraine.
There is a certain languor to this documentary, interspersed with oppressive images of burnt-out buildings in Mariupol, which seems appropriate to the scale and horror of the situation. Still, I would have liked to know more about how these women of different generations think about each other’s attitudes and decisions. Even though there is a wealth of material – as not just Lishchynska herself, but also her mother and daughter regularly allow their daily lives to be filmed – many issues are only touched upon.
However, A Bit of a Stranger does add a new perspective to the films and documentaries I have seen so far about the horrifying Russian invasion of Ukraine, by focussing on the shattered identities of subsequent generations, in this case women, who grew up at a time when Russia and Ukraine were still part of the same nation, or at least when the Russian language was still a relatively uncontroversial part of Ukrainian culture.
Ukraine / Germany / Sweden 2024, 90 minutes
Director Svitlana Lishchynska
Production Albatros Communicos
Producers Anna Kapustina
International Sales Film Harbour
Script Svitlana Lishchynska
Cinematography Petro Tsymbal, Krystyna Lizohub, Ivan Fomichenko, Vlad Dergunov, Maryna Svitlychna, Denis Strashny, Anja Zhukova, Shaun Holder, Jasleen Kaur Sethi, Jack Bradley, Jack Laurenson
Editing Svitlana Lishchynska, Anja Zhukova
Sound Nataliia Avramenko
With Svitlana, Valentina, Alexandra, Stefania
