Timestamp (France, Netherlands, Luxembourg and Ukraine, 2025)
Original title: Strichka Chasu
Director: Kateryna Gornostai
Screenplay: Kateryna Gornostai
Running time: 125 minutes
War is one of those realities that, unfortunately, always surpasses fiction. If it’s difficult for Brazilians to imagine what it would be like to live in a scenario of daily conflicts with another country threatening peace, the documentary Timestamp certainly gives us a better understanding of what it’s like to live this way.
The film follows several Ukrainian schools that have had to adapt to the country’s new reality in order to continue educating the new generations while some of the older ones are fighting. With their distance from the borders being the central element in discussing how protected these places are, we need to face a reality in which young children are already accustomed to the signaling of air raids and automatically head for shelters. We know situations in which young people spent their entire high school taking online classes because there was no safe place to meet, an underground school to avoid interruptions and, in one of the saddest moments of the film, training very young children to differentiate between a teddy bear and a teddy bear with a bomb.
With this subject being so difficult and very current in Europe, given that the continent is directly affected by the conflict, one can understand both the desire to make the film and its necessity, considering that the war isn’t over yet and this will be a reality for many years, even after it ends. So, considering this war reality, the film has difficulty exploring more about what effect this has on the development of young people, what their career possibilities are, their plans and desires.
In other words, one feels the lack of a more human perspective on the individual experiences of children, as opposed to this perspective that seeks to present many different experiences, but ends up depersonalizing each young person. We talk a little with each of them, but don’t go into depth about any of them. Many narrative possibilities are opened up, but many of them do not develop further or come to a conclusion.
The film ends up feeling more like a report than as a film narrative, which is still extremely relevant both when we think about preserving these images and showing this reality. The language and the medium end up not being important, with the message overriding everything.
Translated by: Renata Torres
