House Made of Splinters (2022)

This was one of the nominees for Best Documentary in 2023, edging out a competative short listed field. There is so much pain in this movie, and unbeknownst to them, so much more pain to come. It is filmed at an orphanage in Eastern Ukraine before the war began there in February of last year,and it's hard to push away thoughts of how much this part of the world has been decimated over the last 18 months. Where are these children and their caretakers now? While the director couldn't have envisioned what would soon happen in this part of the world, they do capture the impact of cycles of violence and trauma, which certainly work their way into cataclysmic pain and suffering for generations to come without the Russian tanks and bombs. The raw moments the film captures in this facility are a testament to the trust the doumentary team clearly built with everyone there—and that ability to capture truth without interfering or manufacturing gives his film an undeniable emotional power. The story unfolds at Lysychansk, a facility in Ukraine where parents can drop off children for up to nine months, at which point they're put into the foster system. The idea is that it's a place for kids to be while adults deal with things that no child should endure, like alcoholism or abuse. The problem is that these demons often take longer than nine months, and sometimes parents simply don't return for their kids, succumbing to addiction so badly that it changes their parental status, and there are almost no happy endings to be found here.