Crimean Childhood around 2000

Portable video recording devices entered the mass market in the 1980s. As a result, children born in the 1990s became the first generation whose childhoods were extensively documented on video. In Russia, this period also coincided with profound political, cultural, and economic transformation. The film is based on a family video archive recorded with a portable Sony camera purchased by the filmmaker's father while serving as a captain in the Russian Navy. Drawing on these home videos, the film examines how large-scale historical and political narratives shaped the everyday reality of one family and permeated the experience of childhood. It explores the formation of national identity, the sacralization of politics, cultural colonization, and the ideological narratives promoted by the contemporary Russian state. At its center is a person born in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, whose cultural identity was formed at the intersection of Russian and Ukrainian cultures. Confronted with Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, they revisit their family archive in an attempt to understand how ideology, memory, and personal history became intertwined.

Anastasiia Bergalevich is an artist, filmmaker, and writer based in Karlsruhe, Germany. She was born in Crimea in 1996 and grew up in St. Petersburg, Russia. Her practice combines moving image, artistic research, and writing to explore questions of memory, identity, media, and the post-Soviet experience. Crimean Childhood around 2000 is her debut film, drawing inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900 and Oxana Timofeeva’s How to Love a Homeland.