“Stop-Zemlia,” which was screened at DPAC this past weekend, is a tender coming-of-age film following 16-year-olds in Ukraine. The film’s protagonist is Masha, a girl with pale, bleached hair cropped short and a vaguely vacant air about her. Though she seems quiet and out of place compared to the boisterous students in her class, Masha has found a home in two other indie kids — Yana and Senia. The film, like its adolescent subjects, doesn’t know where it wants to end up and just follows them as they live in the moment — texting anonymous secret admirers during biology class, worrying about the shelling in their neighborhood and grooving to lo-fi beats at a house party.
This focus on capturing the teenagers’ lives rather than having a conventional story line betrays director Kateryna Gornostai’s roots. Though this is her first feature, she has made documentaries like “Euromaidan, Rough Cut” (2014) that chronicles the Maidan Uprisings in Kyiv, where citizens protested against then-President Yanukovych’s move to increase economic ties with Russia.
“Stop-Zemlia”, though not overtly political, shows Gornostai’s love of the documentary form as she lingers on the teenagers’ haunts: their bedrooms that show off their personalities and unconventional framings. She intersperses slice-of-life scenes with interview segments of teenagers at Masha’s school where the characters talk freeform on topics like love, mental health and their uncertainty about the future.
The slice-of-life scenes of Masha with her friends Yana and Senia were the most touching. In one sequence, the three staying the night at Masha’s house all sleep in the same bed and companionably go on their phones in the dark before going to sleep. In another, Masha butters bread for Senia as they talk meanderingly about the rumors people at school have about Senia being gay, just because he is a boy with two female best friends. Their conversation with the characters’ lack of assumptions or judgment and self-deprecatory quips felt utterly real. I appreciated the film’s focus on platonic intimacy.
In scenes like the above, the characters seem exactly like teenagers anywhere else. However, the precarity of Ukraine’s political situation lurks in the background of “Stop-Zemlia.” Though the film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2021, around a year before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the film shows us how ordinary citizens had been feeling the shadows of conflict ever since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014.
Sasha, the boy that Masha quietly pines after, tells his mother that he was considering joining the army after high school. When his mother stoically suggests that maybe he was physically unfit to be a soldier, Masha says, “They’ll take anyone nowadays.” At school, Masha and her peers take “pre-conscription” classes where soldiers teach them about different rifles and where students do target practice.
The reality of impending conflict makes it more understandable why these teenagers seem more given to escapism and more embracing of uncertainty than usual. The non-diegetic sounds that Gornostai uses — twinkly and slightly dissonant synth music — perfectly capture this feeling of transience and slight melancholy as well. The teenagers think about entrance exams to university and talk abstractly about how notoriously difficult they are, but in the interview scenes, most of the teenagers don’t seem to believe that there is a point to thinking that far ahead.
After all, they’re still kids. They’re still on the playground playing “Stop-Zemlia,” an Eastern-European Marco Polo-esque game, where the word “Zemlia” means world in Ukrainian. They shut their eyes, and submit to the moment as they “stop the world” and try to find their friends.
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