With its world premiere at Sheffield DocFest, Time Machine Maidan is an immersive and reflective lesson on Ukraine’s formative revolution.
Time Machine Maidan is no ordinary documentary. Moving beyond retrospective, award-winning director Volodymyr Tykhyy and Berlinale-nominated filmmaker Roman Liubyi play with perspective, time and narrative in this picture of the Maidan revolution that caused such a shift in Ukraine’s modern democracy.
Alongside archival footage and untethered camerawork, Liubyi and Tykhyy stray from traditional documentary techniques, creating a character who narrates this time-bending journey through the Maidan protests and the more recent Russian invasion. What could have been a conventional historical documentary is instead a formally ambitious work that confronts the audience with the harrowing truth and violence of Ukraine’s past and present.
Opening on the Donbas front in 2023, not long into the Russo-Ukrainian war, a young soldier is wounded after an ambush. Critically injured and barely conscious, he somehow transports through time, finding himself in December 2013, during the early stages of Kyiv’s Maidan uprising. What follows is a journey through the revolution’s unfolding, littered with his childhood memories and his life in the present day. As violence and protest escalate, the audience weaves through time and space with the soldier, as he tries to find a friend already lost to the present-day war.
Taken from interviews with the Ukrainian army’s youngest soldiers, the narrator is an amalgamation of true stories and experiences, acting as a collective memory. At the same time, the young soldier’s entrance into a landscape 10 years earlier gives him the distance needed to tell such a story, scripted with a loose familiarity but no real grasp on the details of Maidan’s bloody events. Giving it a modern perspective and framing it in light of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, Liubyi and Tykhyy aim to address younger people and inform them. “Young Ukrainians need access to an authentic history, rather than censored narratives or concepts shaped decades ago under the influence of Russian mythmaking”, Tykhyy writes in his introduction to the film, “The film seeks to answer a fundamental question: ‘Who are we, as Ukrainians?’”
The authenticity of this history lesson is detailed, sometimes gory and always haunting. With clarity and grit, scenes of rioting, police brutality and injured protestors show the truth of that fateful winter, and what led up to such major political change in Ukraine’s trajectory. It’s equally hard to watch and hard to tear away from, so immersive and enthralling in its formal techniques and story that it challenges you to face the brutal hardships.
One of the most impressive aspects of Time Machine Maidan is its incredible range of footage. The cameras do not avoid confrontation or retreat to the sidelines, but remain embedded in the action, recording events right where they happen. From one scene to another, from 2013 to 2024, you are so aware that no event could be predicted, and yet the narrative strings this story and these images together well. The archive accumulated by the Babylon’13 film collective forms the foundation of this content, with hundreds of hours of Maidan events recorded by more than twenty cinematographers throughout that period. Stitched together with this story and narrative, the footage is seamless, preserving the immediacy and unpredictability of the events up close.
In other moments, there is a dreamlike quality that portrays the haze of this time-travelling soldier. Liubyi uses Gaussian splatting to create this effect, bringing the archive footage back to life with this visual rendering technique that stretches the image in a 3D effect. Implemented throughout to create a sense of temporal liminality, these eerie shots attempt to recreate spaces and moments that ‘no longer exist’ according to Liubyi, who used the technology as his own kind of time machine.
Time Machine Maidan is singular in the ways that it blends fiction with documentary and the past with the present. It defies the films of Maidan that Liubyi calls “speechless and observational” and attempts to educate new audiences about a part of Ukraine’s geopolitical history that is so formative yet so easily forgotten since the start of the current war.
Premiering at Sheffield DocFest, the film is an excellent demonstration of how documentary can transform archival material into something immediate, powerful and deeply alive.
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