5 Days of Oscar Docs: A House Made of Splinters

A week-long guide to the Academy Awards' strongest and most overlooked category.

The Ukrainian movie Klondike ends with the female protagonist giving birth amid the rubble of what once her house, surrounded by soldiers who ignore her cries of pain until she is forced to cut the umbilical cord with her teeth. Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Full of Splinters is the story of what happens next. Despite the fact the the children’s home in Lysychansk where the movie is set is, as an opening title informs us, only 20 miles from the front line, the conflict feels distant inside its walls. But its echoes are everywhere.

Although House is fitfully narrated by one of the women who run the shelter, the movie is told almost entirely from the perspective of the children, particularly three of them: Eva, Sasha, and Kolya. The shelter can only keep the children—who have mostly been removed from their parents because of issues with alcohol, abuse, and homelessness—for nine months at a time, but many of them have been there before, often more than once. Eva calls home to talk to her mother, and when there’s no response, she dials her grandmother’s number almost by rote, to ask, “Is mom drinking again?” Although these kids are largely elementary school-age, they’ve already adapted to the cycle of abuse and neglect, and when their parents miss a visit or show up reeking of alcohol, it’s no more or less than they expect. In one scene, the children gather in a circle to predict each other’s fortunes, and rather than engage in wishful thinking, they tell each other the darkest version of the truth: “You’ll drink heavily, and your children will live in an orphanage.”

And yet, in this fragile and temporary place, the children also find a way to live in hope. They play games and choreograph dance routines (if you’ve never seen a group of Ukrainian tweens floss, well, here’s your chance), and behave as if there’s more to life than simply surviving. It isn’t easy. Kolya, only a year or two removed from adolescence, is poised right on the edge of giving into nihilism, falling under the influence of older boys who already seem well on their way to prison. You can see him straining to find his place, at one point scrawling “JOKER” on his hand as proof of his toughness, at others so achingly vulnerable you feel like taking him into your arms.

A House Made of Splinters doesn’t underline why these children lead such hard lives, anymore than it explains why virtually all of their parents seem to be chronic alcoholics. Wilmont leaves to us to understand, more deeply than if we were simply informed, that this is the legacy of decades of intermittent war, an environment where conflict never stops, only pauses. Stay long enough at the shelter, one of the social workers informs us, and you’ll see the same girls coming back year after year, until one day they’re not there because the state has taken them from their parents, but to visit their own children.

It’s disheartening that such a delicately moving and breathtakingly intimate documentary has gone more than a year since winning a Best Director award at Sundance without acquiring a U.S. distributor. (The same goes for Klondike, which won Best Director at Sundance for world cinema, fiction.) But if you’re in or near New York, you’ll have a few chances to see it this week: Feb. 8 at IFC Center, with a taped introduction by Wilmont, and Feb. 11th and 15th at DCTV’s Firehouse. Hopefully there will be more to come, and it’s also scheduled to be broadcast as part of the next season of P.O.V. on PBS. (Update, Feb. 21: A House Made of Splinters is now available for digital dental. Hooray!)

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Previously: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, All That Breathes