A House Made of Splinters

A House Made of Splinters

Last month, “A House Made of Splinters” was nominated for the Oscars. This film snuck in over some very strong contenders in the Best Documentary category and is hitting VOD and limited theaters today. If you have seen it, you are not too surprised. It is accessible, moving, and tragically timely.

Though filmed at an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine before a war broke out there in February 2014, it is hard to forget how much this part of the globe has been destroyed in the last year. Where are these children and their caretakers now? While this group could not have foreseen what would happen next in that part of world, cycles of violence and trauma which certainly work their way into the fractures of this landscape for generations to come were always going to be present for all who inhabit it.

Wilmont toes a dangerous line when it comes to emotional exploitation but his film is so littered with raw moments captured within these walls that one can only assume he earned the trust of everyone involved and that ability to capture truth without interfering or manufacturing gives his film undeniable emotional force.

“A House Made of Splinters” takes place at Lysychansk, where parents can drop off children for up to nine months before they go into foster care. The idea is that it’s a place for kids while adults deal with things kids should never have to see alcoholism or abuse but often these demons take longer than nine months; sometimes parents just don’t come back for their children because addiction has taken hold of them so deeply that they legally cease being parents.

The Lysychansk kids know more about their situation than we think they do the movie reminds us that kids are always smarter than adults want them to be and it’s heartbreaking listening to them talk around their home lives here or seeing how badly they wrestle with homesickness, trauma, fear. They fight each other constantly, or the adults do, especially the boys one cuts his arm then uses a marker to deface the place.

And Wilmont opens up how much situations like this ripple through generations. “She copies what she saw in her childhood,” says a social worker who talks about seeing mothers who were children at Lysychansk herself now dropping their kids off here.

But Wilmont is careful not to let things get too miserable, showing us just how much joy kids can find even in these circumstances. It’s moving when a girl is devastated that she can’t reach her alcoholic mother, but there’s something even more powerful about the next scene, where she plays with bubbles down a corridor with her friend: Kids need to be kids.

They need to laugh together. They need to smile at each other. The most powerful thing about Lysychansk is that it remains capable of allowing those moments to happen among its children, even after so much consistent grief has passed through its doors since the cameras stopped rolling.

There were some instances where Wilmont could have turned away a few seconds earlier, but I guess it’s just the protective parent in me who wanted to turn off the camera and give them their space. That is a tricky line to walk, making a film about childhood trauma. Because there’s only so much approval a kid can give for that now being part of film history forever, and this documentary is so lean in form that it sometimes over relies on private emotion. But Wilmont doesn’t cross that line as often as some other filmmakers have before him, and maybe it speaks to how much these kids trusted him that they let those moments become public.

He knows better than to ruin everything with too much music or too many tears close-up shots though there are enough of those here to make this one of the most emotionally draining movies in recent memory. Instead, he gets most of his mileage out of simple observations: catching a troubled young man laughing with his friends; framing the light behind two kids playing behind curtains. Every kid plays. Sometimes even when they know they’ll get a splinter playing or whatever.

Watch A House Made of Splinters For Free On Gomovies.