After the fall of the Iron Curtain, a young couple discovers a strange, newly open world

It’s almost impossible to know what a moment in history means while you’re experiencing it. This truth sits at the heart of Hindsight, a film by the Ukrainian director Max Rykov, who is now based in the United States. For this intimate project, he dusted off his parents’ long-buried VHS recordings, most of them shot before he was born, after the fall of the Iron Curtain. The footage depicts the pair as their homeland was experiencing a fragile new sense of hope, and follows them on their travels while working for the World Bank, documenting journeys to countries including Vietnam, India and Cuba. As Rykov expresses in drifting, lyrical narration, this experience teemed with contradictions – between freedom and poverty, and between emerging globalism and indelible heritage – that grew more complex with each border crossed. Releasing the film amid the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war, Rykov brings a circularity to the work, once again placing the audience in a precarious moment that gestures towards a deeply uncertain future.