A Picture to Remember is an essay-style account of the war from the perspective of three generations of women. There are frequent video calls between Olga, her mother (a pathologist working in a morgue, where it feels surprisingly safe during bomb attacks) and her grandmother. Recordings of their conversations are interspersed with photos and videos from the family archive, news reports and collective images that portrays the Ukrainian history of the last century.
The result is a kaleidoscopic and personal film. Travelling fluidly through time, it connects the current violence in Donbas with the destruction there during WW2. A sense of absence and loss prevails throughout.
Content warning: depiction of war
CREW:
Director: Olga Chernykh
Producer: Regina Maryanovska Davidzon
Sales:
Stranger films
Director
Olga Chernykh
Olga Chernykh was born in Donetsk, Ukraine in 1990. In 2017, she graduated with an MA from the cinematography department of the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Karyi University and worked as a director of photography on various Ukrainian and international fiction and documentary projects, after which she received a postgraduate diploma in documentary filmmaking. Olga has taken part in several international workshops and residency programmes such as the IDFA Academy, the Aristoteles Workshop in Romania, Cinemaambulente in Italy, Eurasiadoc in Kyiv, B2B Docs etc. She was awarded a Special prize for her short video Express Your Taste at the International Papaya Young Directors competition in Poland. Olga has also received a cinematography award for the same video at the Kinooko festival in Kyiv.Selected Filmography
Tiny Summer Trilogy (2023), The Land of Aliens (2023), The Flood that No one Saw (2019), Real Jazz (2019), Hives of my Heart (2019), Coldness (2017)