Just days before another massive Russian missile attack, Danish director Simon Lereng Wilmont arrived in Kyiv for the Ukrainian premiere of his new documentary, A House Made of Splinters. Some of the heroes of his tape also came to the show. The director and his team filmed a film about the everyday life of children from an orphanage in the Donbass in 2019-2020, before Putin launched a full-scale war in Ukraine.
For a whole year, the director and his colleagues worked in Lysychansk, a strategically important city in the north-west of the Lugansk region of Ukraine. People there have been suffering from the conflict since 2014 – the front line was very close. In the spring of 2022, this large industrial center with a railway station again became the center of full-scale hostilities. Lisichansk is one of the oldest cities in the region – it was here that the first mine in Donbass was opened in 1796.
However, this documentary is not about combat. The focus is on children and their everyday life in an unusual orphanage: the Lisichansk Center for the Social and Psychological Rehabilitation of Children. Each of them has a hard fate: someone was deprived of a family by war, someone is forced to live separately from parents suffering from post-traumatic stress disorders or alcoholism.
Donbass and the spiral of social problems
“Obviously, social problems in this region existed even before the hostilities began here in 2014. But for so many years, the war that has stood on their doorstep has pretty exhausted their strength,” Simon Lereng Wilmont said in an interview with DW. In his opinion, unemployment and lack of state support could also have “perhaps invisible, but no less radical consequences” that, against the backdrop of the convergence of civil society and war, contributed to the unwinding of a spiral of social problems.
“House of Fragments” tells about the life of the pupils of the Lisichansk center, where they can stay for up to nine months – waiting for a court decision on guardianship. Here children find friends, and, of course, hope for the arrival of their parents or loved ones, often in vain. This film is about children who are waiting in this house for a decision about their future fate. On the screen, they nonchalantly communicate and play, but the viewer understands that, despite their young age, they have often encountered evil and are too familiar with the dark sides of life: domestic violence, alcoholism and drugs.
Employees of the orphanage try to immediately find long-term solutions for their wards. If you’re lucky, there is a relative who accepts the child, or a foster family. All those who are not taken in the end inevitably end up in one of the state-owned orphanages, often overloaded.
Rocket stuck in the roof
On February 24, the day Russian troops invaded Ukraine, the city administration did not wait. All the children from the Lisichansk center were taken to a safe place in the west of the country, and some of the children then found refuge in other European countries, says Simon Lereng Vilmont.
The city was heavily shelled, and then it was occupied by the Russian army. The director shared in an interview that employees of the children’s center who came to the premiere in Kyiv told him that one of the rockets hit the roof, but did not explode. “She’s just stuck in the ceiling,” the director is quoted as saying by eyewitnesses. And he adds that this stuck rocket perfectly describes the current situation.
History through the eyes of a child
This is not the first time the Danish director tells the viewer a story “through the eyes of a child”. For a whole year, when hostilities were already taking place in this region, Vilmont accompanied a 10-year-old boy and his grandmother with a camera, who lived right on the front line. He presented their everyday life to the public in his documentary “Barking Dogs in the Distance”, which was released in 2017 and was nominated for an Oscar.
House of Pieces is shown at various festivals across Europe and has already won the Politiken:Dox Award from the Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival. The film was also shortlisted for the European Film Awards for Best Documentary.
Simon Lereng Vilmont no longer wants to return to Ukraine to carry out another war project. He is confident that his fellow Ukrainian filmmakers will be able to tell this chapter of their own story better than he can. At the moment, the director is trying to show both of his documentaries to as many people as possible – in order to “draw the attention of the whole world to the events in Ukraine.”
The film will be shown to Zelensky
At the screening of “House of Fragments” in Kyiv in the auditorium was the Commissioner of the President of Ukraine for the Rights of the Child and Children’s Rehabilitation. She was deeply moved by the story and suggested that the director organize a screening for the President of Ukraine and his advisors.
According to the Danish filmmaker, this film touches on a number of important issues that need to be addressed. For example, this is the issue of creating small private orphanages instead of impersonal state institutions of this kind, as well as the need for new centers for the treatment of alcoholism. But all these issues can only be resolved “when the Ukrainians kick out the Russian occupiers,” says Danish documentary filmmaker Simon Lereng Vilmont.
House of Pieces was presented this year at the Osnabrück Independent Film Festival and at the Human Rights Film Festival in Berlin. It is also available to watch on the Berlin Festival platform. until 31 October.