Still: Nice Ladies - Mariia Ponomarova

Ukrainian director Mariia Ponomarova has very strong Dutch connections. She moved to the Netherlands in 2014 to do her Masters programme at the Netherlands Film Academy and has stayed in the country ever since. However, her new documentary feature, Nice Ladies* (an international premiere at Hot Docs) again took her back to her homeland.

The film (sold by CAT&Docs) portrays a group of 50 year + cheerleaders in Kharkiv who compete in competitions. This is a sport and therefore “a serious business” as the director puts it.

When Ponomarova began work on the project the war had already been raging since 2014, but she had no idea that Russia was going to launch its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. She first discovered the ‘Nice Ladies’ in 2019 when she saw a short item about them on Ukrainian public TV. 

“I thought it was a fantastic opportunity for way more than just praising them for doing something outstanding,” the director remembers. “[But] I was quite convinced that somebody would already be making a film about them. I was a bit shy about contacting them but then I found their social media pages.”

The director wanted her all-female film crew to be as much of a team as the ‘Nice Ladies.’

“I wanted to build a relationship between my crew and their crew…there was definitely mutual fascination. Of course, we went through ups and downs. Also, when we started getting to know each other, we went through various dynamics.”

The team’s coach Nadia is a very strong-willed figure who had her own ideas about how the film should be made.

For obvious reasons, the invasion completely transformed the direction of the documentary. “It is 180 degrees,” the director says of the about-turn in the film she finally made. Any idea of exploring the women’s lives in subtle, nuanced fashion or of making a poetic movie “about bodies and movement” became impossible given the enormous conflict that had broken out around them.

In the wake of the war, one of the cheerleaders Sveta fled to the Netherlands with her family. Nadia and the team’s captain Valia stayed in Kharkiv despite the bombing and destruction.

“Stopping was never an option for two reasons,” Ponomarova emphasises that she didn’t ever consider abandoning the project. “One, I am quite a stubborn person. I don’t really give up easily. Sometimes that is good and sometimes that is bad. The other reason is I acknowledge my privilege - I am in safety, I am Ukrainian based in the Netherlands and I could keep on working on my film…I needed to keep on doing this. When so many women are in such circumstances, who am I to abandon this?”

Continuing to work on the film was also “a coping mechanism” at a time of huge personal and political turmoil. The director was partnering with both Dutch and Ukrainian producers. Her Ukrainian partners were Tabor, the outfit whose other credits include Butterfly Vision and Fragments of Ice. The Dutch producers were Amsterdam-based Labyrint Film. Both had been involved from an early stage, even before the pandemic.

Ponomarova had shot nine days of pre-invasion material that ended up being used as “a first act’ in the film. She talks of the “great fun” filming in Kharkiv, and Kyiv for Ukraine’s Got Talent. Principal photography on Nice Ladies was originally due to start in March 2022. But then the invasion began. After that, the filmmakers had to scramble and troubleshoot “as quickly as possible but also as ethically as possible. There was much less experimentation. It was much more survival mode.”

Nice Ladies had its world premiere in Movies That Matter in March. Cinema Delicatessen is handling the Dutch release, set for mid-June. “We really hope that people will be excited to see Nice Ladies because it is a film full of laughter, tears and bittersweet moments, painful moments but moments that are worth living through,” the director says of a documentary that ended up being made in the face of war.

Find more information on Hot Docs Festival here.

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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund