‘Mariinka’ review: CPH:Dox opener is arresting but tonally uneven account of life in east Ukraine

Dir/scr: Pieter-Jan De Pue. Belgium/Netherlands/Germany/Sweden. 2026. 94mins

Wide-ranging in scope and ambitious in its execution, Pieter-Jan De Pue’s documentary Mariinka traces the interwoven lives of a group of young people from the titular town in Eastern Ukraine. Shot over 10 years, this striking, structurally complex observational film starts with rumbles of unrest in the Donetsk Oblast region, before war engulfs the entire country and the citizens of the region adapt accordingly. The balance between the propulsive on-the-ground combat footage and the more meditative scripted moments is not always a harmonious one. But this is an arresting and at times lyrical picture which shows the many faces of conflict.

 Lacks clarity on certain key issues 

A promising female boxer quits training to become a military paramedic; an enterprising and fearless young woman makes a living by smuggling goods across the frontline; two brothers find themselves fighting on opposite sides of the conflict, while their youngest brother, adopted as a baby by an American couple, struggles to process his loyalties to the country of his birth. There are a lot of moving parts to this picture, making it, in some ways, a more challenging undertaking than De Pue’s 2016 debut feature doc, the Afghanistan-set The Land of the Enlightened.

That film premiered in Sundance, where it won a jury prize for best cinematography for De Pue’s striking camerawork. Once again, De Pue shot Mariinka himself, on 16mm, and his eye for striking imagery is one of the film’s main assets. While the market for documentaries about Ukraine is somewhat crowded, this is a distinctive addition, notable for the time invested in exploring these stories. A healthy festival run seems likely: following the film’s premiere in the opening slot of CPH:DOX, Mariinka will next show at Thessaloniki and at Belgium’s Docville.

With its multiple characters, wide span of time periods and jarring shifts between dreamy, Mallickian visual poetry and bruising combat footage (it sometimes feels like two entirely different films spliced together), this is likely to have been a challenging picture to wrangle into shape in the edit suite. And while there are moments where it seems that a central thesis might have been lost somewhere along the way, it’s a testament to the skills of the six credited editors that the picture flows as coherently as it does.

De Pue uses one of his key characters, aspiring boxer Natasha, as a guide through the messy complexity of life in a city claimed by both sides of a war. We first see Natasha as a luminously pretty teenager, photogenically gathering blueberries from a hillside before donning Ukrainian traditional dress for a folk festival. The film then cuts abruptly to Natasha as an adult, impassively treating casualties from the nearby frontline.

Her narration – her voice has a flutelike, almost childish quality – introduces some of the other characters. Of four brothers raised in an orphanage, one, renamed Samuel, now lives in America as the adopted son of a devoutly Christian couple in Mississippi; one brother, Mark, fights for Ukraine and another, Ruslan, for Russia. The fourth brother, not included in the film, is recovering from a severe injury. The final character to be woven into the story is smuggler Angela, a childhood friend of Ruslan who, unlike Mark, is still happy to talk to him by phone. All of these lives have been scarred early, by the death or one or both parents, or by caregivers lost to alcohol or substance abuse.

The predominantly observational approach means that the film lacks clarity on certain key issues – we never learn, for example, how Ruslan and Mark came to be fighting on opposite sides of the war. And some of the footage involving Natasha revisiting the wrecked places of her childhood – the hall where she graduated, her bombed-out home – feels a little too contrived to carry real weight. But elsewhere in the film, there are images of extraordinary power, not least a remarkable sequence in which the unflappable Angela wheels a pushbike loaded with smuggled goods through an active combat zone, shouting a cheery greeting to the soldiers as she passes.