Olga

Elie Grappe's 2021 film is set in 2013. Olga, a fifteen-year-old Ukrainian gymnast, is exiled in Switzerland and trying to earn a place on the national team there. At the same time the Maidan protests begin in Kyiv; her mother, a journalist, is in the middle of them, which puts both of them at risk. The film sets two arenas side by side: the measured, supervised world of a gymnasium, and an uprising watched through a phone. The tension between the discipline Olga imposes on her body and her inability to intervene in what is happening at home is its central subject. Anastasia Budiashkina, who plays her, is genuinely a reserve member of the Ukrainian national team and performs her own routines, and Grappe works real Maidan footage into the film. It screened in Critics' Week at Cannes. Who it's for: viewers who like sports drama and European films looking at recent history. Who it's not for: anyone approaching real footage of violence unprepared; the archive passages are hard.