“These last couple of days it’s really quiet I think because of these peace deal negotiations, but it’s always on,” Kateryna Gornostai says of the war that continues to rage on in her native Kyiv, graciously agreeing to be interviewed despite the possibility that the power could go off any moment when electricity has become an unpredictable luxury. She put her camera down a year-and-a-half ago on her latest film “Timestamp,” surely wishing by the time of its premiere that she could refer to it as being in the past tense. Yet the chronicle of a school year amidst the ongoing invasion is sadly not yet an artifact, depicting how an entire generation have received an education in a time where many schools have been quite literally reduced to rubble and it can be hard to see the point of opening a textbook when it can seem as there’s no future to prepare for.
However, Gornostai couldn’t make a film where despair was predominant when she found across Ukraine that teachers were refusing to let that feeling set in themselves, trying their best to preserve a routine for the young where class might be interrupted by missile alerts or take place across Zoom where plenty of other distractions existed. Visiting various set-ups both physical and online, the director presents lessons for the students well beyond any typical education they could receive as they may not be entirely conscious of the lengths the educators go to maintain a sense of nomality, but can be inspired by their resolve as well as learn things that have a very practical application in the environment that they’re in, whether it’s to learn of how Ukraine resisted past efforts by Russia to absorb the country, being trained in survival skills such as scavenging that they may need in the event of sudden loss or to use their imagination in art classes where their minds can be taken off of the instability elsewhere.
“Timestamp” doesn’t diminish the tremendous turmoil caused by the ongoing war or the trauma it’s bound to have for decades to come, yet it reflects both adaptation to unthinkable circumstances and a persistence of the human spirit that is hard to fathom until tested by such extremes and accentuated by a deft deployment of a chorus of buoyant voices, Gornostai’s survey of schools throughout the country becomes galvanizing in depicting a national collective will. The artful film also becomes a reflection of one of the country’s great new filmmaking talents who could’ve been quite discouraged herself when her narrative debut feature “Stop-Zemilia” was poised to make her an internationally renowned filmmaker upon its debut in 2021 where it won a Crystal Bear upon its unveiling at Berlinale, yet saw its reach dulled by a rollout during the pandemic. The drama, which proved bracing in its raw authenticity as it delved into a host of relationships between high school classmates and presented those coming of age already having to prepare to defend itself when the Donbas region had been under attack since 2014, was developed with techniques Gornostai had picked up from making a series of documentary shorts ahead of it, such as engaging her cast in workshops to develop a narrative influenced by their real lives, and her graceful touch with using cinema to bring out emotional truths in reality is on full display in her return to nonfiction.
One of the year’s best films of any kind, “Timestamp” is screening in Los Angeles as a one-night only event across the Laemmle Cinemas as part of their Worldwide Wednesdays series before becoming available everywhere to stream and it was a privilege to speak with Gornostai about how “Timestamp” came to be, why it was so important to document this moment in Ukraine and capturing the surreal experience of carrying on in a time of crisis.
How did this come about?
It started as an initiative of teachers themselves. We have this organization that is called Osvitoria, who have worked for a long time for the prestige of teachers’ profession. They [hand out] the Global Teachers Prize in Ukraine and they collected a lot of different text [and information] about what teachers witnessed in 2021, the year the invasion started. The text was really powerful and they presented this text to us [with] this idea in mind that they really want to do something in some other media about that. Each story deserved to be its completely own film, but the problem was that [the events that were described] already happened a year [earlier]. It was not a coincidence that they [contacted] our crew because we had filmed before, but the problem was the most powerful things already happened.
So we decided to go and see what the schools looked like right now and when we got there, as a film crew, it was obvious that we wanted to do an observational film without any commentary or any interviews about what happened before, but convey the reality that unfolds here and now. It was not contradictory to what Osvitoria wanted, but for us it was something different because it contained everybody — not only teachers, but the schools themselves as an organism with children and everybody [else].
From what I understand, you could set up Zoom calls ahead of time to get a sense of what you were going to film. What was it like to prepare for a shoot like this?
Zoom interviews were a big part of our preparation because we had a heavy camera setup. It was an Alexa Mini, so we had to have these scheduled shooting days and we needed to plan ahead a lot to know where we’re going, so it was made not like a classic documentary where you have a lot of time. So these Zoom interviews were the starting point, [beginning with] interviews with people that were authors of this text [that Osvitoria gave us] to see what they’re doing right now. We also started to collaborate with [school] administrations of different regions because they did the same work [as Osvitoria] to collect the stories and we researched news [to find connections when] something happened and we reacted immediately the next day. For example, to shoot a funeral, it was immediate and we were reacting quickly if something would happen, but the interviews helped us to envision what we’re going to shoot because there were sequences we could imagine.
You can predict some things because of what’s happening in the school during the year, so we knew we really want to shoot the [first day of school on the] first of September and the prom. But what was new and really interesting for me was the 24th of February because It’s an important day for us, the day when the war started, and I knew that some schools would do something to commemorate that day, but by accident, we found a post on Twitter by Alina Sarnatska, the woman that came to school [to address everyone], so it was about creating something like a plan, but then to see if reality [intrudes]. For example, I’m really happy that we found the story of a teacher that teaches online and her kid goes to online school and I had in mind this picture of them [both attending school] in the separate rooms of one house. It was obvious that somewhere you could find such family, but we didn’t know them, so we looked a lot for them and luckily in Zaporizhzhia, we found such family that are actually in different schools. He studies in one school, she teaches in another, but it was lucky that we actually envisioned something and it happened in real life.
Being based in Kyiv, was there anything that surprised you when you were going out into other regions of Ukraine?
Yes, it was not even surprising, but I would say enriching for me as a person because I didn’t travel a lot across Ukraine before. I actually feel really sorry that I didn’t do that. I hadn’t been to eastern part of Ukraine at all — to Donetsk, Luhansk, Mariupol. I haven’t seen these cities and maybe I wouldn’t [have without this film]. In Kyiv, we have these night attacks. We have blackouts. It was actually better [during the time] when we shot the film. Right now it’s a lot worse, but we went to different places and saw how the war was going on. We were not on the front lines, and when you’re closer to the front line, it’s like another way of perceiving reality as normal.
When you come to Zaporizhia, [which is really] close to front line, they have alerts for ballistic attacks five times a day, so sometimes it’s even impossible to shoot a lesson properly because people are going to shelter constantly. It’s annoying and it’s scary and for people that are not used to that like us, we see that people are still in the cafe, finishing their dinner, and it’s okay for them, but for us, [we think the] ballistic [attack could be] really quick.
One thing I remember vividly was when we go into these places that were 15, 20 kilometers to ground zero, you’d need a press officer that would accompany you in order to film and we had him with us [on some shoots] and we had full ammunition on us to be safe. But when we came to the spot where we would [film], for example, a ruined school, our [subject] went without any ammunition, so it was really strange. We would be totally [protected] as a film crew, like a press crew, and they are like ordinary people in their t-shirts and trousers without any [protection] and we’d hear artillery some 20 kilometers from us. But people [living in the region would go] with their kids in strollers or going to the park with a dog. It was uncomfortable to feel unsafe yourself here when everybody [else] just lived their life. It was strange and it was a lot of different overwhelming experiences to go to the [other] regions, but I’m really happy that this film actually gave me opportunity to see a lot.
Was it difficult to figure out what the presence of the war would be when the teachers are often protecting the students from being overwhelmed by it?
Yeah, together with Nikon Romanchenko, who edited the film, we had this in mind a lot. We really want to keep the war as the ghost that was always present. We tried to construct this mosaic narrative where you’d always remember that it’s here in the back of your head, even if everything’s okay in the frame. This is actually an engine of the story that drives the narrative and keeps this suspense alive inside of the film [when] this suspense is part of our daily life. It’s sunny outside today, so it’s really good weather and it seems like you have this good mood because of the sun, but you’re reading everything, trying to catch all the different alerts to see what’s coming and from where.
We really tried to do that in editing and construct such a route for the audience through the material to become an emotional rollercoaster, mostly towards the end. It’s different episodes that are contrasting different emotions, sometimes containing both sad and happy things together and we tried to make [drive towards some] climax. But this approach of being tender with reality, we had it even in shooting period because it’s something that you feel when you go to such places, maybe it’s something that [the locals] feel on a daily basis. I feel tender towards people that live here and experience all this. I don’t know how to explain it. But I really wanted to capture the standardness [of life in wartime]. That’s why “Timestamp” [is the title]. “Timestamp” has these two meanings. It’s part of a tourniquet as a life-saving tool, but on another hand, it’s preserving this time for these people maybe to see themselves in 10 or 20 years to preserve what we look like and how we felt during the start [of this war].
The music is such a beautiful part of the movie – it’s often quite buoyant and comprised of a chorus, it really brings the human voice out. What was it like to work on the score?
For a long time, I really wanted to work with Alexei Shmurak because he’s one of the best avant-garde Kyiv-based musicians right now and I really wanted to put a choir in the film and at the beginning, I thought it would be a children’s choir but then when we talked to Alexey, he thought it would be too much of children if it would be in the sound as well, so we decided on professional female voices and when we were in editing, we decided that we would have these five interludes in the film that actually needed the support of the music because they could could not be alive without it. They would act like these pauses in the material where you would relax and just listen to the music without any text because the film has lots of dialogue. That’s why you need these pauses, not to read any subtitles and just to listen.
That was the task of Alexei to do these five different tracks and we gave him these already edited sequences and we [spoke about] the direction of the music and he made a rough cut of this music by himself, using the piano and his voice to show how it would look [with] three different voices. It was funny because he’s not a singer, but it was understandable how it would be when it was finished and some of these tracks were brilliant from the beginning. Some were things that we worked on, but I really like the soundtrack because it has a character. I really didn’t want this ambient music that is constantly used in documentaries and drives this atmosphere into some other place or gives you the hint what you need to feel. I really wanted something that, like our camera, is one of the characters. It’s like a protagonist that sees the world, like a mother that is tenderly looking at all of this. It’s really not just a tone that keeps it all together, it’s something that accompanies you as well and I really want to work with Alexei on [other] films.
When you started out in documentary and developed a hybrid approach to the ultimately fictional “Stop-Zemilia,” was it interesting to return to nonfiction formally?
It was really interesting because I actually didn’t see myself as a documentary filmmaker anymore. I felt more comfortable in this fiction world when I could have something that was really dear to me and put it inside of the fictional script and then develop it with the dramaturgy and make something even more out of it. And I still do that — I’m developing my second fiction film right now. But this documentary approach of dealing with things, as we did in “Stop-Zemilia” with actors, it’s the most precious way to work for me, so I didn’t have any contradictions to go to completely documentary [again] formally because it’s something we already do a lot and right now in Ukraine is the time of documentary cinema, obviously. It’s a communal work. You can do your scripts and try to develop your fiction films, but you need to be a part of this. You need to create a part of this big, big narrative of war that a lot of people are creating. A lot of [narrative] directors right now are doing documentaries because it’s what we can do. This is our job to do these timestamps for the next [generation] to remember it.
“Timestamp” opens on December 17th in Los Angeles as part of Laemmle Theaters Worldwide Wednesday at 7 pm at the Laemmle Glendale, Monica Film Center, Encino Town Center, Claremont 5 and Laemmle Newhall. It will be available on VOD on December 19th.