Fragments of Ice review – fascinating chronicle of Soviet collapse through the lens of a Ukrainian ice skater

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Film-maker Maria Stoianova mines her father’s video diaries from the 1980s and 90s to document the decline of communism – and his obsession with western shopping malls Here is an interesting film which does not render up its meaning easily: a personal piece about memory, and an enigmatic essay about the decline and fall of the Soviet Union as it was experienced by one family in Ukraine, based entirely on home-movie video footage. It is innocent and transparent, and yet subtly encumbered by the sadness of history. I can imagine Adam Curtis quoting this in its entirety for some new compilation about the post-communist 20th century. Film-maker Maria Stoianova presents us with video clips shot by her dad, Mykhailo Stoianov, an ice skater and ice dancer with the Ukrainian national ice ballet company who, throughout the communist 1980s and into the new era, toured the US, Canada, the Middle East and western Europe. (Mykhailo even played Blackpool in the UK.) The skaters were a privileged cul...
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All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt review – experimental film pulls on the senses

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Sundance film festival: Raven Jackson’s gorgeous, sparsely worded debut film evokes the non-linear memories of one Black woman in Mississippi

There will be a moment in All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt, the gorgeous, unconventional debut from Raven Jackson, when the film’s spell works. It may be in the first 15 minutes, lulled by Mississippi’s lush soundscape and meditative shots of a southern summer, or an extended take in a hospital delivery room. It could wait until the final scene, an ode to memories already recorded and yet to come.

The pull of this sparsely worded, deeply sensitive film will probably depend on what triggers one’s personal sentimentality and, more pertinently, how much you know about it going in. The plot is so loosely outlined, and the camera so frequently turned to hands over faces, that it could be difficult, sans context, to pick up on its ambitious logic: a series of non-chronological memories in the life of one Black woman, connected by the senses of touch and sound and particularly attuned to the lingering feel of one’s skin on another.

All Dirt Roads Taste of Salt premiered at the Sundance film festival and will be released later this year

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