It’s the summer of 2022 and a group of dancers meet in rehearsal in Poland, some of them Polish, and others Ukrainian. Peers borne in crisis: the Ukrainian dancers are all refugees, recent arrivals who poured into Poland along with ultimately hundreds of thousands of their compatriots escaping war. How can movement return oneself to oneself? Fragments of Resilience, by photographer, filmmaker, and dance aficionado Anna Semenova—herself, at the time, one of said Ukrainian refugees sheltering in Poland—asks. If the body is displaced, the soul living elsewhere—in the homeland, so geographically close and yet so impossibly far away—what is it to be in relationship, still, to home? The dancers rehearse a performance called Every Minute Motherland, and the immediacy of the work is just as palpable as Semenova’s documentation of its development. As viewers, we are catapulted into a world where art becomes not an accessory to living but a necessity for survival. I remain equally in awe of this filmmaker and her subjects for having the wherewithal to create and connect, making art in times of great calamity, when displaced themselves, when torn from their homes and families, every day worrying if they are alive and what horrors they must have lived through in order to survive, as I learn, through their act of resistance and insistence that dance is testimony, a very direct and present act. Live performance, in this film, is alive in movement as well as in stillness. There is nothing virtual about it. Every gesture is a puzzle piece of culture, and culture making itself, in a time of the attempted obliteration of a nation, is precisely the antidote to the aggression suffered. Though it won’t single handedly end this or any war, Fragments of Resilience shows us how, quite literally, art—as each dancer in this film does—takes steps towards liberation.

Aurora Prelević
Writer, performance artist, cinephile, programmer