FAMILY PORTRAIT IN BLACK AND WHITE (Julia Ivanova, Canada). 92 minutes. Subtitled. Rating: NNNNN
Here’s an emotionally absorbing subject filled with layers of complexity. In a modest house in a small Ukrainian town, Olga Nenya raises 27 kids, among them 16 black children who were abandoned by their mothers and orphaned because of their race.
There’s tension with the outside community – ignorant neighbours, tsk-tsking health inspectors – but there’s also bickering within the mixed family, as the loving, hardworking yet hardline Nenya gushes over one no-good son while standing in the way of another’s talent for soccer or a daughter’s desire to move to Italy. (After the Chernobyl disaster, a summer exchange between Ukrainian kids and European families began.)
The next-to-last scene, in which one of Nenya’s children describes his treatment in a psych institution, is so full of horrific details it couldn’t be made up.
