Set against the backdrop of a stark and atmospheric Ukrainian countryside community, Maryna Vroda’s feature film debut, Stepne is a blunt yet also revealing journey through a fractured and painful world as it follows Anatoly (Oleksandr Maksiakov), who has returned to his childhood home in the countryside to look after his dying mother but soon finds himself caught up in memories of family traumas, though shortly before her death the mother tells Anatoly about a treasure.Vroda has been working on the film for many years, having first announced the project shortly after she won the Palme d’Or at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival for her short film Cross. Along with his brother (Oleg Prymohenow), Anatoly finds himself looking into old family secrets and memories, and after his mother dies the funeral acts as a place for memories to be unearthed. The film also takes an astute narrative sidetrack away from Anatoly to allow focus to fall on the elderly people who survived wartime Ukraine and suffer from a sense of bitter trauma from those harsh times, which naturally also serves to highlight issues facing modern-day Ukraine.Nicolas Bell wrote for Ioncinema: “Navigating a template which taps into neorealism as much as it does a docudrama, Vroda’s narrative saunters into more of a chronicling exercise of a disappearing culture than linear storytelling… Vroda tends to hone in on an unyielding sense of desolation, both in the pristine wintry landscapes and the cramped interiors which range from disarrayed bedrooms to bars serving as stages to share despair. Director of Photography Andrii Lysetskyi lavishly outdoes himself with the melancholic gelidity of the remote countryside, and it isn’t surprising to see why the area’s population is dwindling. With crumbling Stalin inspired artwork fading away in the woods and broken stone busts slowly overrun by foliage, Stepne evokes the words of Shelley’s Ozymandias as regards the diminished vestiges of the Soviet Union. ‘Nothing beside remains. Round the decay/Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare/The lone and level sands stretch far away’.” Mark Adams