It takes a village — or what remains of one — to raise a child in “Timestamp,” the latest in a shattering run of documentaries presenting the current reality of living in Ukraine as Russia continues to wage its unconscionable war on the territory. From the Oscar-winning “20 Days in Mariupol” to “Porcelain War” to Sergei Loznitsa’s recent “The Invasion,” such films are building toward an essential artistic and journalistic archive for an ongoing atrocity. Collectively, they make for an overwhelming wall of tragedy — from which Kateryna Gornostai‘s film somewhat differentiates itself with its focus on the young people hoping to someday call this present the past, and those equipping them for whatever the future holds. There’s devastation aplenty in “Timestamp,” of course, but also a bright beam of hope that feels both unforced and hard-earned.
The only documentary selected for this year’s Berlinale competition, Gornostai’s second feature follows her fiction debut “Stop-Zemlia,” a coming-of-age portrait that won top honors in the same festival’s Generation 14plus strand in 2021. (It received a multi-platform U.S. release the next year.) On the face of it, this wholly candid, scriptless doc may seem a creative departure for the filmmaker, yet the tender human interest of her gaze is an obvious connecting factor between the two films, as is the lucent delicacy of her shooting style. (Gifted DP Oleksandr Roshchyn was behind the lens on both.) Above all, however, “Timestamp” confirms Gornostai as a naturally empathetic and insightful chronicler of youth in all its torment and giddy newness — in this case daunted but not defeated by hard times.
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Using no narration, talking heads or any other form of commentary across the doc’s 125 minutes, the filmmaker instead plants her camera in a range of elementary and high school classrooms across the country — onscreen titles indicate where and how far from the frontlines of conflict they are — to observe the old educational routines that persist in wartime, and the new ones that swiftly become unremarkable. Shooting took place between March 2023 and June 2024, and while Gornostai and editor Nikon Romanchenko don’t impose a rigidly dated timeline on proceedings, the film roughly follows the arc of a school year — culminating in the end-of-an-era rush of graduation, here an especially conflicted milestone of anxiety and promise.
A solemn opening montage of empty school corridors is broken by the exuberant clatter of a gymnasium in session, a flurry of gangly young limbs speeding along its worn wooden floorboards. A couple of minutes later, Gornostai will cut to a similar gym hall, bombed out and scattered with broken glass. “Timestamp” is rife with such switches and cycles in atmosphere across common educational spaces, as the film drives home their fragility under the circumstances. In the classroom, business as usual — be it an art class for eager grade-schoolers or a more mature, thoroughly pointed history lesson on the evils of totalitarianism — is often prefaced with a ritual minute of silence for the dead, and regularly interrupted by air raid sirens.
Those harsh, swelling wails of warning become the film’s punctuating sonic motif — in stark contrast to the buoyant, babbling vocal interjections of Alexey Shmurak’s unexpected a cappella score, a literal chorus of humanity amid the chaos. Each time they sound, the sirens cue a hurried evacuation of all children and staff to cramped shelters where some especially insistent teachers attempt to continue their lessons against competing noise from other classes and curricula. For the students, the evacuations at first carry an air of palpable panic, even a perverse frisson of adventure, though with frequent repetition, mortal danger gets blunted into exasperated boredom.
As for the teachers, they adapt to the moment with timely lesson plans that they do their best to normalize. Kindergarteners are taught the importance of not touching foreign objects in the street in the same cheerily didactic tone one might use to explain how traffic lights work. Older children are given a thorough and rather alarming tutorial in how to assemble and fire a rifle, though any attempted military propaganda is undercut by glum reality. During a special assembly, a young female soldier fields questions from children and struggles to offer much positivity: “We don’t,” she answers bluntly when one girl asks how they cope in battle.
Elsewhere, a gaggle of cherubic tweens perform a carefully rehearsed anti-war number for gathered teachers, their fresh, earnest faces disturbingly matched to the lyric: “Who will bring back the bright smile of the mother whose son I killed?” It’s one of many moments in “Timestamp” to show us formative life lessons being learned in an unorthodox order — whether in the classroom or, in the least welcome kind of field trip, a funeral for a beloved principal killed in a blast.
It’s not all a tough, premature induction into adulthood. Joy and play and ebullience are captured here too: a birthday celebration during a sheltering period, complete with cake, or a ritual folk dance for graduating teens. “This is your life — it’s all for you,” a soldier addresses the class of 2023 near the end of this moving, vibrant mosaic of survival, though you sense the brave-faced youths wondering just how much will be left for them.