THE RETURN OF IVAN

A film about identity, memory, and time, shot in Ukraine and Russia, with the main narrator being the Russian-speaking journalist and writer Ivan Avramov, who now lives in Kyiv, set against the backdrop of the war fronts in the East and the fluid geographical space.

Following The Pomegranates of Nagorno-Karabakh and The Wedding in Afrin, this is the third and final part of journalist and documentary filmmaker Thomas Sideris' trilogy on the fluid enclaves of both geographical and imagined spaces, the defenseless people caught in the whirlwind of global geopolitical developments, and the formation of multiple identities in a fragmented world.

As Ivan attempts to piece together the fragments of his memory and identity, dating back to the Soviet era, he repeatedly returns in his mind to his ancestral (and now occupied) homeland of Urzuf to write a war diary. However, a letter from an old university classmate from Moscow State University will upend his understanding of reality. His scholarly father, who fought against the Nazis, the Great Patriotic War, the draconian Stalinist laws, and his old friends who easily switched allegiances—all come into play.

Ivan is confronted with his memories, his disillusionments, and the ghosts of the past as the soldiers of the Azov Battalions meet Russian soldiers in Mariupol, while desperate villagers struggle to survive amid separatists, Russophiles, pro-Ukrainians, militias, and self-proclaimed defenders of whatever national conscience and memory remain, in an uncertain and uncontrollably violent world.

A film where verses from Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem converse with the reflections of Marcel Proust from In Search of Lost Time. Notably, part of the documentary was shot on Super 8 film with a camera the director has owned since he was fourteen, undertaking his own descent into the past—just like his protagonist—when both first encountered, in different worlds and different eras, the masterpieces of Russian cinema.