Mariinka Review | Ukraine War Diary Reflects Borders Within Families

Pieter-Jan De Pue’s Mariinka sweeps over a breadth of time and history, refracting the Russian invasion of Ukraine through splintered perspectives. Gradually, they assemble into a sobering testament to massive violence tearing Ukraine apart. Schools, hospitals, cities collapse under heavy shelling. War intrudes right into the heart of families, rendering the familial alien and rival. Two brothers, Ruslan and Mark, find themselves on opposing sides of the Russian occupation. But the Ukrainian town they are from has been rent by Russia for more than a decade before the 2022 invasion. The Belgian documentarian uses a wandering rhythm to undercut trajectories caught in war’s crosshairs. We flit from the brothers to other accounts, including that of a smuggler, Angela, darting between the borders with daring and an edge of pure recklessness.

Premiering in main competition at CPH:DOX 2026, Mariinka intercuts several parallel journeys, some in close dialogue, others jutting out in isolation. Natasha might have blossomed into a boxer, but the war has her reconsider all ambition. She becomes a military paramedic, incited by her grudge against doctors for failing to save her mother. Natasha is quiet, persevering and rescues countless lives. The film bears trauma and lyricism on a tide of impressionistic vignettes. These sit between frontal depictions of carnage and emotional musings. A film of such immense tonal extremes would have been waylaid in the hands of a lesser director. But De Pue finds threads and resonances across seemingly disparate strands and emotional impulses. This film isn’t interested in just being a dutiful chronicle. Sequences break up and drift into existential reverie. Amidst rubble, poetic visions streak through. De Pue shows the full scope of ravages wrought on Ukraine, while wandering to reflect a bigger sweep of life under duress.

War shifts everything—even the lives and decisions of those who were extracted from the situation at an early point. The youngest brother, Daniil, was adopted by an American family and taken to Mississippi as a child. Rechristened as Samuel, he has been actively sheltered from the horrors his brothers deal with, but the conflict registers whenever he catches on videocalls. Inevitably, no distance from the war can make it recede. Samuel too gets passionately riled up. He wants to fight, do something, while his brothers have flung their entire lives away. This is also because of the false sense of power American gun culture abets. He moves far beyond the safety nets his adopted parents have so far put him in.

The years witness Samuel getting furthermore entrenched in military appetite. He begins to believe that’s how he can steer his life, as his parents watch in horror from the sidelines. Characters wrangle with war, breaching all private reckonings. Any intimate space vanishes amidst public declarations of full-tilt aggression. In a later scene, Ruslan pleads with Samuel not to sign up for the defence. He has seen up too close how both factions feed lies and deluding narratives. “It’ll make you not want to live,” he tells Samuel. But the latter has already been influenced by military rhetoric and its triumphalist weight. Mariinka captures the growing splits between the closest—how nationalistic trumpeting thrusts apart families and kin. It’s the slow, deadly journey of being emotionally torn away from family. The lead-up gets to the ultimate point where neither brother can trust the other. Allegiance shifts wholly towards their individual national cause. “There’s no such thing as a brother in times of war,” one remarks. Both Ruslan and Mark confess belief that they wouldn’t be spared by either when crisis tightens. This mutual realisation doesn’t trigger alarm so much as resignation. There can be no return to the familiar, old unaffected love and concern. It’s grown narrower, curdled by battlefield scourges.

Shot over a decade, Mariinka maps how brutal ideals grow and humanity is snuffed out. Violence unleashed by borders fundamentally rewrites the brothers’ destiny, just as it does with the two women we follow. They can no longer live, love, hope and dream the same way. All they know is to fight relentlessly for their convictions, casting everything else away. This is an epic tragedy, told in deviations and asides while cohering into a full-bodied, visceral wartime record.