Family Portrait in Black and White

Canadian director Julia Ivanova spent three years working on this alternately inspiring and troubling documentary about Olga Nenya, a Ukrainian foster mother who oversees as many as 20-plus children at a time, most of Ukrainian-African descent. Many of her xenophobic neighbors believe that it's wrong for the races to intermix, while others claim that a non-white child can't be 100% Ukrainian, although the kids—mostly the offspring of visiting African students—don't see it that way. Unfortunately, the kids sometimes have prejudices of their own, like Sashka's dismissal of Arabs. Nenya's child-rearing operation—called Hope and Homes for Children—receives funding from the United Kingdom, but lacks basic amenities, such as a working toilet (they use an outhouse), although the kids have food, clothes, pets, a piano, room to roam, and plenty of company. A charity also sends them to homes in Italy and France each summer. A state inspector, who arrives unannounced during filming, declares, "The living conditions in the house are appalling," but middle-aged divorcée Nenya insists that she's doing the best she can. Furthermore, the kids smoke, drink, fight, and talk back, but they still consider Nenya their mother, even if she can be overly possessive: Nenya turns down Western couples who offer to adopt the kids, refuses to encourage Kiril's music studies or Roman's soccer talent, and shuns those who move away. According to Nenya, "Music doesn't put food on the table," and she believes that a working-class life should be sufficient, but this otherwise affectionate caretaker appears to have let her fears of abandonment and nostalgia for the Soviet regime cloud her judgment. An engaging family portrait, this is recommended. Aud: C, P. (K. Fennessy)