‘A House Made of Splinters’ Review: A Heart-Tugging Documentary Portrait of Children in Limbo

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film CriticIn the same way that children at slumber parties share ghost stories after dark, a group of young boys regale each other with tales of horror in their shared dorm, as a kaleidoscope lamp casts strange, shifting patterns over their faces for extra atmosphere.

These aren’t supernatural chestnuts or spooky urban legends, however, but grim recent anecdotes. One boy recalls how his father stabbed his mother in the chest, only to be released on a pardon; his peers, shrugging and sometimes laughing, reply with their own experiences of abuse.

Neglect and abandonment is what unites the young residents of the Lysychansk Center in Eastern Ukraine, where the children of unfit parents are sheltered for up to nine months while their next steps are decided.

In Simon Lereng Wilmont’s exquisitely intimate documentary “A House Made of Splinters,” the camera waits with them, quietly observing a fragile limbo period from which life can go in any number of directions — including, for the least fortunate, a return to the hardship they left in the first place.