“As a visceral document about the moment a country solidified its new identity it’s an impressive feat of curation and editing”

Ukraine is a young country. Even though it gained independence from the USSR in 1991, the true birth of the modern Ukraine took place between November 2013 and February 2014, during the Euromaidan protests and the so-called Revolution of Dignity. A large-scale uprising against then-President Viktor Yanukovich, whose intentions to move away from Europe and back into the arms of Vladimir Putin’s Russia enraged many Ukrainians, ended in him being removed from power and Ukraine breaking away from Russia for good. It cost a substantial number of lives (the offical death toll of the culmination of the protests in February of 2014 stands at 108 protesters and 13 police officers), but this fight for Ukraine’s freedom directly informs the country’s resistance to Russia’s aggression since 2022.

In Roman Liubyi and Volodymyr Tykhyy’s hybrid documentary Time Machine Maidan this direct link is conceptualized in the form of a fictional soldier on the Donbas front whose injuries make him go into a liminal space. It’s not a portal to the backrooms, but a passage through time, and he ends up on Kyiv’s Maidan Square in 2014. There he goes on a search for the (very real) poet Maksym Kryvtsov to warn him of his future death (Kryvtsov died in service in January 2024). He is an inspiration and mentor for the fictional lead ‘character’, and a participant of the Revolution of Dignity. As our unnamed soldier is an eyewitness to the protests, the government’s attempt to crack down on it, and the eventual victory with the ousting of Yanukovich, a narrative emerges of a people that will not back down.

Liubyi and Tykhyy give this narrative shape by using footage from the Babylon’13 project, a collective formed right before the Revolution of Dignity by a group of 20 people documenting (on video) all the events on and around Maidan Square. The unnamed soldier’s voice-over weaves a story through it, of a girlfriend, a Canadian journalist, of Berkut (the Ministry of Internal Affairs’ riot police) trying to disrupt the protests. It’s incredible how the directors manage to create a coherent image of a revolution through this fictional tale using disjointed archival footage.

Since a lot of the footage lacks context in isolation, to achieve that goal Liubyi and Tykhyy have to rely on a lot of exposition from their fictional protagonist though, and that starts to chafe at some point. Furthermore, since the film only gives us bits of the current war at the start of the film, the connection to what happened at Maidan is a bit strained. The bookending segments of young soldiers looking into the camera (the protagonist is the result of interviews with several such soldiers) is the clearest link that a new Ukrainian identity was formed in those early months of 2014, an identity that now fights fiercely for its independence. But the link is far less clear in the meat of the film, even if the unnamed hero literally (or spiritually, if you will) links the two conflicts. The transition from one to the other, a result of an imaging technique called ‘Gaussian splatting’ in which 3D images are rendered from 2D pictures, sometimes blurry and incomplete, sometimes clear as crystal, is the film’s most artistic feature, and a beautiful way to create a state between life an death on screen. This is an artistic, visual link though, and doesn’t inform the viewer clearly about why Maidan was so important to what is happening now in Ukraine. When the film reaches its conclusion that freedom is not about changing your fate, a reference to the protagonist trying to save Maksym Kryvtsov, but about having the courage to forge your own path, that feels like a mission statement to Ukraine’s resistance to Russian aggression, but it doesn’t really feel like a conclusion that emerges from what the film has shown up until then. That leaves Time Machine Maidan a film that doesn’t entirely achieve its goal, but as a visceral document about the moment a country solidified its new identity it’s an impressive feat of curation and editing.