The passengers are asked to get their documents ready. She is on the road again, again it is the humming of the diesel engine of the train. Mariia is crossing the Polish border. By now, she has had several passports and visas. Her mother once said that they could become her photobook. But there is something new about Mariia’s latest passport – it is missing her patronym, “Volodymyrovna”. Now she is just Mariia Ponomarova, taking to the road of memories. It is a road passing stations of the patriarchy, going via the tracks of post-colonialism and history that crossed her family ties. Mariia’s father is still in Kyiv, but she no longer has her patronym. It has been erased, omitted, ignored. How did that happen?

Employing the structure of a road-movie and the experience of train-travel by many Ukrainians during the war, the Ukrainian director Ponomarova explores the meaning of patronyms during the Russian military aggression in Ukraine. In Russia and former Soviet republics, patronym or paternal name is a second name obtained from the father and used in formal conversations. In many places, it is not just a relic of the past. Rather, it is a mundane sign behind which many layers of the history can be traced. Ponomarova, currently working in the Netherlands, has created a hybrid-film in the form of an essay to revise the personal, the autobiographical, the (post)national and the ironic. Like grenades, she throws witty questions that many have been wanting to ask.