87 min | NR | February 21, 2023 | Giant Pictures
A documentary crew embeds in a shelter near Ukraine’s eastern front, where children wait out the legal limbo between a broken home and whatever comes next. The camera does not flinch and does not perform. It just watches kids be kids in a place built to hold the wreckage adults leave behind.
A House Made of Splinters follows children at a state-run shelter in eastern Ukraine, near the front line carved out by years of war. The kids arrive because their parents drink, vanish, or lose custody. By law they can stay only nine months before a court decides their fate. Simon Lereng Wilmont builds his film around that ticking clock and the small society the children form inside it. The real subject is not war. It is what happens to the smallest people when the adults around them fail.
The children carry the film without ever knowing they are performing. Eva plays at toughness and rebellion and then breaks down waiting for a mother who does not call. Sasha forms a fierce attachment to another girl and treats the friendship like the only stable thing she has. Kolya runs with older boys, smokes, and steels himself against affection because affection has only ever cost him. The staff who care for them are not saviors. They are tired women doing impossible triage with limited beds and a legal deadline.
Wilmont directs and shoots much of the film himself, and his camera lives at the children’s eye level rather than looking down at them. He shoots in soft, available light that makes the shelter feel lived-in instead of institutional. The editing holds on faces long after a lesser film would cut, letting silences do the heavy work. There is no narrator and no interview chair. The score stays sparse, so when it arrives it registers as grief rather than manipulation. Wilmont refuses the cheap move of treating these kids as symbols of a nation.
This is filmmaking built on patience and refusal. Wilmont could have made a war documentary and reached for shelling and statistics. Instead he stays in one building and watches the generational damage pass from parent to child like an inheritance nobody asked for. The film offers no tidy resolution because the system it documents offers none. It earns its sorrow by never reaching for it.