Timestamp (Strichka chasu)

"People need hope. And school represents everything they hope for their children: a better future a world rising from the rubble." That's how Belgian conflict journalist Rudi Vranckx described the power of education in hopeless circumstances in an interview with the Flemish education magazine Klasse. The weight of that promise of change is deeply felt in Timestamp, a documentary by director Kateryna Gornostai, filmed in Ukraine between March 2023 and June 2024 on the initiative of the non-profit educational organisation Osvitoria. Even under constant threat, school life continues as normally as possible. In doing so, students and teachers try to hold on to fragments of their pre-war lives, from 2022, and in some regions as far back as 2014. It may seem surreal, but for them, it has become reality.

A sun-drenched school performance in a suburb of Ukraine's capital, Kyiv. A young girl sobs uncontrollably in a teacher's arms. Stage fright? The celebration is suddenly cut short by an air raid siren. Everyone has two minutes to reach the shelter. In an earlier scene, students had about the same amount of time to complete a class assignment... Throughout Timestamp, the air raid siren returns again and again—just as abrupt and jarring as the a capella choral music by composer Alexey Shmurak. At designated national moments of silence, a ticking clock creeps in, threatening to break the stillness. The film's title first and foremost refers to the timestamp written on a tourniquet, a crucial detail to determine when it's safe to remove the life-saving band.

In the only documentary that featured in this year's Berlinale competition, learning and teaching are happening while the bleeding is still being staunched. In person or online, in makeshift classrooms or what's left of them. In cities that have been liberated or are still under fire, far from the frontlines or dangerously close, spared or destroyed. When a resident returns to one of the most heavily damaged neighbourhoods in northern Kharkiv, he sighs: "The stoicism of our people is really something." Just beyond survival mode, Timestamp celebrates the resilience of local (school) communities through a mosaic of fleeting, captured moments. And every piece matters.