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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Who was Muriel Box, Britain’s most prolific female film director?

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She was also the first woman to win an Oscar for best original screenplay. Now a new radio documentary aims to give her pioneering work a fresh appraisal

In 1991, as a film student, I was offered £50 by a German women’s collective to shoot Muriel Box. But when the documentary director and I arrived at her home we were told that she was too ill to see us. She died a few months later aged 85. While I regret never meeting her, I’m also relieved. How terrible to have shown even a glimpse of my full ignorance of her achievements, a pioneering film-maker who had fought her way through an industry hostile to women to make a major contribution to cinema.

Box directed 13 feature films in the 1950s and early 60s and remains Britain’s most prolific female director. Her titles, made for a mainstream audience, include The Passionate Stranger, an imaginative retort to the romance novel, which boldly experiments with form; the controversial juvenile courtroom drama Too Young to Love; and Box’s favourite, The Truth About Women, an eclectic tapestry of the complex lives of women.

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