Movie Review SSJ

It should have been autumn. The sycamores lining West Lake in Hangzhou trembled with leaves on the brink of falling, their skeletal branches clawing at a porcelain-blue sky. Yet the air around Linglong Town, adjacent to the Academy of Fine Arts, clung to an oppressive warmth, thick with the dissonance of misplaced seasons. This atmospheric disorientation followed me into the dimmed theater, where Anna Eborn’s Transnistria (2019) unfolded as a 93-minute hypnosis—a documentary that, much like the unrecognized republic it chronicles, exists in a liminal space between presence and erasure.

I. The Geography of Nowhere

Transnistria, a sliver of land wedged between Moldova and Ukraine, declares itself a sovereign state yet remains a cartographic ghost. Since its self-proclaimed independence in 1990 following the Soviet collapse, this breakaway republic has persisted as a geopolitical paradox: a nation with its own currency, military, and hammer-and-sickle emblems lingering on administrative buildings, yet absent from UN maps. Eborn’s lens does not confront this political ambiguity head-on. Instead, she dissolves borders, immersing viewers in the riverine rhythms of the Dniester—a natural artery that carries both the silt of forgotten histories and the weight of adolescent ennui.

The film’s opening frames establish a trance-like tempo. Sixteen-year-olds Tanya and her cohort drift through landscapes suspended outside linear time. Summer arrives without thunderstorms; winter descends without blizzards. Seasons blur into a single continuum of listlessness, where the Dniester’s currents mirror the languid pulse of youth itself. The camera, a hand-cranked 1920s Debrie Parvo, becomes an accomplice to this temporal dislocation. Limited to 30-second takes and devoid of synchronized sound, its mechanical whirr evokes the breath of a sleeping giant—a relic resurrected to document lives unfolding in history’s shadow.

II. Bodies Adrift: Youth as Allegory

Eborn’s subjects exist in a state of ontological ambiguity, their lives echoing Transnistria’s unresolved sovereignty. Tanya, the sole girl among a group of boys, oscillates between vulnerability and defiance. Her question—“Do you love me or not?”—hangs unanswered, a refrain that encapsulates the film’s refusal of resolution. Romance here is not a narrative arc but a series of gestures: daisies plucked as substitutes for roses, shared cigarettes in derelict Soviet factories, bodies sprawled on tombstones reading poetry to the dead.

These adolescents inhabit ruins both literal and metaphorical. They shoot hoops at a makeshift basketball court flanked by crumbling concrete monoliths, their laughter ricocheting off faded murals of proletarian heroes. In one haunting sequence, they scale an abandoned construction site—a skeletal high-rise that gestures toward modernity but remains eternally unfinished. The setting transforms into a Beckettian stage: the act of climbing becomes its own purpose, a rebellion against the inertia of their geopolitical purgatory.

Eborn’s observational style resists psychologizing. We never learn the boys’ names; their conflicts—petty jealousies, fleeting alliances—surface through glances and silences. When Tanya’s brother marches in a military academy ceremony, his crisp uniform and stiff salute rupture the film’s organic flow. Here, the state asserts itself through ritual, grafting ideology onto adolescent bodies. The contrast is deliberate: while the military cadet embodies Transnistria’s aspiration for recognition, his peers remain spectral, their existences unbound by national projects.

III. Archaeology of Light: The Camera as Time Machine

Cinematographer Virginie Surdej’s use of the Debrie Parvo is no mere aesthetic affectation. The camera’s limitations—its inability to record sound, its reliance on hand-cranked motion—force a radical presence. Each 30-second take becomes an act of communion, the celluloid grain preserving textures often erased by digital precision: sweat on sunburnt shoulders, ice crystallizing on the Dniester’s banks, the flicker of uncertainty in a teenager’s gaze.

In an age of surveillance capitalism, this analog approach feels subversive. The camera does not capture but witnesses, its mechanical imperfections mirroring the region’s fragmented identity. During a Q&A, composer Walter Hus revealed Eborn’s fascination with “spaces outside time”—a phrase that haunts the film. When the Parvo’s shutter clicks, it doesn’t freeze moments; it embalms them in amber, turning Transnistria’s youth into archaeologists of their own vanishing present.

IV. The Politics of Invisibility

To dismiss Transnistria as apolitical would be to mistake subtlety for neutrality. Eborn’s refusal to explicate the region’s fraught history—the 1992 war with Moldova, Russian peacekeeping forces, the Kremlin’s patronage—is itself a political act. By focusing on the banal (swimming holes, snowball fights, aimless walks), she rejects the Western gaze that reduces post-Soviet spaces to tragedy porn.

Yet politics seep through the cracks. A hammer-and-sickle flag flutters over a schoolyard; radio static occasionally leaks news of Ukrainian tensions; military checkpoints loom at the edge of frames. These are not accidents but tectonic pressures beneath the film’s surface. When Tanya and her friends play-fight with sticks near a Russian garrison, their mock battles parody the adult world’s obsession with conflict. The Dniester, meanwhile, flows indifferent to human borders—a reminder that nature outlasts nations.

V. The Epistemology of Fog

The film’s most radical gesture lies in its embrace of uncertainty. Transnistria’s unresolved status becomes a metaphor for adolescence itself—that liminal phase where identity coagulates and dissolves. Eborn offers no climax, no catharsis. Summer fades to winter; snow blankets the river; teenagers become silhouettes against the white.

In one transcendent scene, Tanya lies atop a grave, reading aloud as snowflakes settle on her lashes. “Who’s buried here?” a boy asks. “No one,” she shrugs. The moment crystallizes the film’s ethos: in a land where existence is contested, even the dead are spectral. Yet by documenting these spectral lives, Eborn performs an act of cinematic sovereignty. Her camera grants Transnistria what the international community denies—a territory of meaning, however fleeting.

VI. Coda: The Afterlife of Absence

Leaving the theater, I returned to West Lake’s sycamores. Their leaves, finally released, spiraled toward the water—a reminder that absence, too, has its seasons. Transnistria lingers like the afterimage of a dream: a portrait of lives lived in parentheses, a nation that isn’t, a love that might have been. In the end, Eborn’s genius lies in making us feel the weight of all that goes unspoken—the gravitational pull of histories, desires, and identities trapped in limbo.

The Dniester keeps flowing. Somewhere, Tanya is still waiting for an answer.