Ashes settling in layers on the surface

This film was born from memory — from fragments of diaries, letters, fairy tales and streets of my childhood city, Mariupol. It began after the death of my mother, when I found her teenage diary tucked away between books about mushrooms and recipe collections. What first appeared to be innocent teenage notes about crushes and family quarrels, gradually unfolded into a quiet record of how a totalitarian system imprints itself on a life.

My grandfather was forcibly taken from his village in Western Ukraine to rebuild the Azovstal plant in Mariupol after World War II. My mother spent her entire life working as a crane operator there. When I was five, she took me up into the crane. The slag on the road sparkled like emeralds, and Azovstal became my own Emerald City.

Through personal diaries and letters, Soviet archives, damaged family photos, and footage I was able to evacuate before Mariupol was destroyed, I began to stitch together a film that would preserve a city that no longer exists. A city that now lives only in memory.

This is my attempt to recreate Mariupol — not geographically, but emotionally. To show how propaganda can shape destinies across decades. To tell the story of people whose lives were quietly molded by a system they didn’t choose. And to speak for those who are no longer here to speak for themselves.

It is an modern industrial fairy tale. It is a personal archive. It is a journey with my younger self — a little girl walking through a dark forest, trying to find her way home.

ZOYA LAKTIONOVA, director

I met Zoya in Kyiv in 2020, at her short film screening, and this young woman, passionate about contemporary art, overwhelmed me. We soon began developing a project to take it over to Mariupol with no other limits than Zoya’s imagination.

Zoya’s filmmaking touched my heart when I was watching her work before, and became my personal motivation to continue working as a producer after being exposed to the experience of the full-scale war.

This film is about the physicality of memories: our presence in the lives of others through things we left behind. It is confirming our sensibility as human beings.

For me, Zoya’s project is now more than relevant since the fall of Mariupol: it provides a great cinema opportunity, through her approach of mixing personal memory and history, to show international audiences Mariupol they have never seen before: peaceful, with hope, with dreams about future – all that Zoya and her generation of the city residents loved about it, and continue to love.

NATALIA LIBET, producer