‘A lot of you are going to an orphanage today … no crying now. Please pack your things by 9am.” In Lysychansk, eastern Ukraine, the women who run a residential centre for children left vulnerable by violence, war, poverty or their parents’ alcoholism are necessarily brisk. Storyville: A House Made of Splinters (BBC Four), the Oscar-nominated film-maker Simon Lereng Wilmont’s documentary about the centre, is full of almost intolerably cold, hard truths about what happens to little ones when society is fractured.
It is, in many ways, an eccentric and bewildering film. Facts and context are kept to a minimum. We know the children can stay for nine months, after which if they haven’t found a foster family or been able to go home, they must move to the dreaded state orphanage. (Whether they are right to dread it, we don’t discover.) But the names and status of the participants have to be gleaned gradually. The ages of the four children the film focuses on remain a mystery – roughly nine to 11 at a guess, although they could be even younger. The staff are not introduced at all, so it is odd that one of them provides a voiceover that tends towards the lyrical (in Lysychansk, “every 10th door hides a broken family”) and jars slightly with the film’s naturalistic, open-ended style.
