Conversation with Kasia Boniecka on Olga Chernykh’s A Picture to Remember

Film editor Kasia Boniecka met Ukrainian director Olga Chernykh during a B2B Doc workshop shortly after the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022. Chernykh faced a question now familiar to many Ukrainian filmmakers: How do you reimagine a film that demands to be told differently amidst war?

The project, which became A Picture to Remember, an essayistic account of Chernykh’s family, needed a rethinking of the approach, unburdened by any rigidity. In an interview with Editing Docs, Boniecka discussed the documentary’s editing process, memory as an organising logic, born from the filmmaker’s recollection of the first moments of the full-scale invasion, and expansive writing, which allowed the director-editor duo to discover many scenes, including the film’s unexpected opening involving champagne.

Olya says in voice-over that her reality has become “an endless dream”, with erased borders between memories and real life. How does the film’s editing style translate this idea? In what ways did associative editing prove useful?    

Kasia Boniecka: One of the things that convinced me to take on the film as an editor was how Olya spoke about the first moments of the war spent with her mother in the morgue in Kyiv. Her mother worked there as a pathologist, so it was not uncommon for her to be there, especially since she was filming her mother for an earlier project, which ultimately wasn’t realised. But on the day of the full-scale invasion, in the darkness of the morgue’s basement, Olya felt memories rising inside her, and then floating and mixing. She was full of fear. Her family had already fled Donetsk in 2014. She thought, “It’s repeating. The story is repeating.”

This idea of memory and blurred boundaries informed the film’s editing style and visual language. Very early on, we set a simple rule for ourselves: we wouldn’t restrict the film to any particular kind of footage. We wanted to stay open because the guiding principle was memory,  and memory has no fixed structure. It moves through the subconscious; it melts and shifts. So we allowed the film to do the same. Associative editing reflects that idea, and for us, it became a way to move freely through imagination, look at footage without interpretation, and keep our eyes as fresh as possible. We were also intrigued by the duality of images, and how certain images imprint themselves so deeply that they stay with you for life. For example, in one of our conversations, Olya described seeing heavy black clouds. They were beautiful, but they made her feel uneasy, bringing back memories of fleeing Donetsk. She felt something similar when seeing contrails, white streaks left behind by airplanes in the sky.

So we explored interesting connections between images. When we came across footage of phosphorus falling on Donetsk, we thought about how visually striking, even beautiful, it was. We also remembered recordings of fireworks in Donetsk. We said, “Maybe we should play with this to hold both realities at once: the past reality of safety and calm, and the present reality of danger and violence.” This gave us the possibility of connecting different materials, filmed at different times, while detaching from their original meaning and reinterpreting them. For instance, we paired microscope shots of parasites with drone footage. We applied this principle throughout the film, including the morgue scenes, and it gave us freedom and even playfulness. The latter was also vital because we wanted the film to retain the family’s shared sense of humour, which keeps them going even though they are separated by the war.

You’ve mentioned that footage filmed in the morgue was originally shot for Olya’s earlier project, which wasn’t realised. Why was it important to incorporate the morgue material in this film?

KB: We felt this material belonged in the film. We had watched everything Olya filmed there with her mother, and despite many people urging us to focus on the archival footage — because it was so precious, and because including the morgue footage would “turn it into a different film” — we didn’t agree. For us, the morgue was the film’s point of departure and the connective tissue holding everything together. But we were quite lost for a while because we didn’t know how to incorporate it organically. After many tries, we realised we had to be honest and acknowledge that this was supposed to be part of a different film. But that realisation came later in the editing process.

I’d also like to add that Olya is a collector of things like her father. She said, “I won’t make a film about my mother working in the morgue, but I have all these bits and pieces of our lives before the full-scale invasion.” In a way, this was an archive of a world that suddenly ruptured, fragments of daily life, and memories.    

The film’s entry point is rather unexpected for a documentary that concerns war. Could you talk about how this opening emerged in the edit?

KB: This came from our conversations and Olya’s informative writings. Our first session took place during a residency in Sweden, where we spent a month working. We used the first week to just talk and take notes. The film was going to be built from very sensitive feelings and memories, and we knew from the beginning that its structure wouldn’t be obvious; it would emerge during editing, shaped by our conversations and where they led us. I had to get to know Olya before I could start digging.

We put all the possible memories Olya had on paper. I also asked her to write an essay, an account of what she experienced in the days surrounding the full‑scale invasion: where she was, what she noticed, what she smelled. I asked her to capture every detail from those two weeks: the week before the war and the week after it began. That’s how we arrived at many scenes in the film and many memories that surfaced. One of the strongest was the champagne memory: Olya drinking champagne with her mother in the morgue, hiding from the bombs. We didn’t yet know this would become the opening scene, as we had many possibilities drawn from what Olya had shared with me. We then spent three weeks working with a board, looking at our material and what it meant, and searching for visual translations for memories.

The essay film takes the shape of a family photograph, introducing each character as Olya addresses them in turn.

KB: We were thinking about the film in terms of memory. But as we worked, and especially as we started using more family pictures in the edit, it began to take that shape. First, we needed to introduce the family members, their stories, and shared ties. For example, the father, who is also an artist with his own way of seeing the world, is an equally important character, but for a long time we struggled to place him within the structure. Eventually we realised we should introduce him early and develop him more later. It was also crucial to incorporate the historical context: the Soviet past, Olya’s experience of growing up in an independent Ukraine, and the fact that Donetsk was a Russian‑speaking region whose residents were often viewed differently in the rest of the country.

Sometimes the film seems like it flows naturally, but it was actually very difficult to build. Thinking of it as a photograph in a way helped us structure it and stay selective about what we wanted to say. That approach also gave us more freedom to play with the flow of memory.

This structure allowed you to bring in other family members while also expanding toward the wider social context and the Soviet past. Speaking of which, the film includes Soviet photos and documents that serve as “proof of a lie,” as Olya puts it in voiceover. Could you elaborate on the decision to include these materials and how they relate to the Soviet history of occlusions and falsifications?

KB: In one of the conversations, Olya’s grandmother says she learned later in life that her great‑grandfather had been a White Army officer who was prosecuted by the communists, as he opposed the Soviet regime. That meant danger for the whole family. We weren’t sure this would be clear from her voiceover alone. Then Olya said, “But we have all the fake biographies of my family,” and we had the photos her father had gathered (he had been collecting photos of the entire family for many years, creating a kind of genealogical tree). The Soviet system forced people to hide or alter parts of their family histories to protect their families. And it took generations to recover the real biographies of Olya’s family members. This became important to articulate in the film. That said, we didn’t necessarily want to pack in more information. That’s why voiceover is present but without detailed historical explanations. The grandmother’s voiceover, placed over images of Moscow and the Kremlin, already creates a sense of incoherence, enough for the viewer to feel the tension without the direct commentary.

The documentary is woven from multiple layers: family archives, video calls with Olya’s grandmother and mother, broader archives from Donetsk, and war imagery. What was your motivation for linking these different registers of reality?

KB: The phone calls are important because they pull us back to the relationship the three women share. It shows their dynamic and their sense of humour. It also portrays the grandmother’s character, who doesn’t want to dwell on hard things and is excited by their call, saying, “Let’s not talk about sad things”. These calls also give us some essential information about her lived reality in occupied Donetsk, as she talks about the daily shelling and passports. We knew we wanted to include the grandmother’s birthday scene, when Olya and her mother call her with champagne in hand, because it became a bit of a recurring motif: Whenever the family met, which we can even see in the archival material from 2014, the three of them would share a glass of champagne. Then came Olya’s birthday, and the trio called each other again. But this time they were separated: Olya and her mother were in different places, her mother already in Kyiv, and the grandmother still in Donetsk. So these phone calls also show the progression of their separation, especially because the screen later divides into three (at one point, we see the grandmother alone; it’s not a phone call, but it feels like it could be).

As for the family archives, there wasn’t an enormous amount of footage — I can’t say in hours now — but there were various recovered tapes from Olya’s paternal and maternal sides of the family. Many tapes had been damaged before Olya’s father recovered them, but we chose to use them anyway, keeping their texture as artifacts of memory. In those archives, we searched for tenderness, love, happiness, the moments people instinctively want to capture and preserve, like the grandmother falling into a ravine, lying there, and singing. We didn’t try to impose single meanings on these archives. We also worked with historical archives from the Ukrainian state collections, and Soviet footage portraying Donbas. The latter was black-and-white, industrial, and centred on factories, which revealed the darker side of the system. These images contrasted with the family tapes.

And then there were the modern archives from Donetsk, filmed before the 2014 occupation, that offered glimpses of a city full of richness and vibrant cultural life, with its ballet performances and concerts. The first time I saw that footage from a Beyoncé concert in Donetsk, I was stunned, especially by those “aliens” descending on the stadium. We immediately knew we had to use it. It felt metaphorical, almost prophetic! So with every archive, we looked for double meanings whenever possible because the film is not only about Olya’s family but also about her relationship with Donetsk and how it has evolved.    

Olya’s reflections on her family’s cyclical experiences of war form the film’s emotional spine. Could you talk about how that writing came together, and how it informed your editing process?

KB: When I heard Olya’s first voiceover tests, I felt an incredible depth in her. I also sensed she wouldn’t express her emotions directly, and that her writing would be poetic. She has a remarkable talent in writing and storytelling. The writing process unfolded throughout the entire edit, based on our extensive conversations and the more informative writings she did for me. I asked Olya to do this, as it’s often easier to write things down than to confide them in someone you barely know. So through her writing, I could grasp the storm inside her, which she laid out to me almost chronologically, including how she found herself in the morgue and what had brought her there.

She wrote mainly so I could have all the story’s details, which we could then use to brainstorm together, for example, about the opening of the film. Once I knew the story’s chronology, I could help her more and offer a fresh eye to her writing. A lot of it also came from my questions. Maybe it even helped that we hadn’t known each other. For example, I asked her about her memory of being frightened as a child. She told me several stories, and we thought about how they connected to our material. She also told me about the parachuting episode, and how she snuck out to go skydiving with her friends and was afraid to come home. We also talked about her relationship with the body. She always said her grandmother was a beautiful woman, very proud of her body and attentive to how she looked. You hear it in the Zoom calls when she says: “I did my hair. Do I look nice?” So I asked Olya: “And what about you? What was your relationship with your body?”    

What ideas guided the film’s music and sound design?

KB: Memories don’t have a “real” sound, and they rarely follow a logic. So in the edit, we would remove the original audio from the footage to help us imagine rather than being confined by what was recorded. Sound can carry emotion the way dreams do, sometimes through solitary notes or repetitions that rise from somewhere subconscious. That guided our approach. Olya was also inspired by the poetic, experimental Algerian film Mariner of the Mountains, which is also built from photographs and archival material. She was impressed by the work of the film’s sound designer, Benedikt Schiefer, and was sure she wanted to collaborate with him. Benedikt agreed to get on board, and he worked with Serhii Avdieiev, a Ukrainian sound designer based in Berlin. Most of the sound is created through effects and Foley, because the archive sound, especially in the found footage, was largely unusable.    

As for the music, during editing we worked with temporary tracks from an album — something in the vein of Space Odyssey — because its blend of music and spatial sound design resonated with our creative vision. As we both love Maryana Klochko’s work, especially in Stop-Zemlia, we asked her to join the project. We felt she could move fluidly between sound design and music, with voices drifting in and out like in a dream.