Director Zoya Laktionova talks about her 2 months of experience abroad in a state of two realities. Her documentary essay interacts with two landscapes in the same space of the video work. The work uses archival family photos of the artist and texts written in the first weeks of the war. The work absorbs one landscape into another, but it is difficult to understand what kind of landscape this act carries out.

Life flows in its everyday reality, but then suddenly something elusive changes its course. All that is left is the chance to plunge into memories where everything is preserved, as if in a museum.
Mariupol is now synonymous with siege and destruction. But for filmmaker-photographer Zoya Laktionova (b. 1984)—see also Maria Stoianova’s Ma—her home town’s waterside has long been a complex, painful locus of memory. Laktionova’s collaboration with fellow Kyiv resident Tetiana Kornieieva (b.1993), a graphic-designer and illustrator, yields a hauntingly melancholic snapshot of littoral landscapes which already exude a post-apocalyptic air even before 2022’s onslaught. Stark scenes are counterpointed by narration recalling joyous seaside childhoods from bygone decades—before the tide’s tragic turn. (N.Y.)