Erik's thoughts on "Ukraine Bride: 13 Years Later"

Like Michael Apted's long-lasting Up series but briefer and set to a more specific narrative, Nili Tal’s Ukraine Brides: 13 Years Later — playing today at the Film Society of Lincoln Center as part of The New York Jewish Film Festival — continues the filmmaker’s sociological investigation into the lives of four women thrust into a difficult marriage. Opening with a title card that reports, “As of the year 2000, women from the former USSR have been building internet dating-sites, inviting Western men to marry them," the film provides updates on three such women whom Tal has been documenting for over a decade. 

Vera, a widow living in Tel Aviv, is given the most screen-time. Married to a stranger who she grew to love, she nonetheless feels like an outsider in her adopted country.  And, as the film soon reveals, Vera is more alone than she at first thinks — after nine years of marriage, her husband, struggling with diabetes and kidney problems related to his past heroine abuse, passes away and leaves her with child and a faulty will.  She now spends her days dealing with lawyers and struggling to provide for her son.

Natasha is featured next, a young woman who fled from her husband soon after marriage and moved in with the director of this documentary. There she met a new man, married, and now spends most of her time in a decrypted old home missing her husband (he is a truck driver consistently traveling to support his family).

Most fascinating is Tanya’s story, a Ukrainian woman who, as a teenager, served as a translator for girls looking to marry foreign men. It becomes no secret that Tanya desires a husband herself, and soon after marries an Israeli man twenty-five years her elder. 

The relationship eventually ends and Tanya returns home to the Ukraine where she meets a new husband in Kiev (with whom she creates a child).  When director Tal — who appears on-screen and often narrates the film — asks her in 2008 if she loves her husband, Tanya hesitates. She adores her daughter but cannot confirm a love for her partner.

Confirming this sense of doubt, Tanya is up and at 'em again soon after that 2008 discussion. She takes her daughter and moves to the United Kingdom to live with her mother and get an education. Tal shows us an interview with Tanya from 2000 where she appeared dead-set on finding a man. This contrasts with current day footage where Tanya now believes a man would have held her back from achieving her dreams.

One of the documentary's strengths is that each storyline goes off into uniquely personal directions with vastly different (and occasionally opposing) outcomes. Vera loved her husband very much, but now realizes the unfortunate situation he has indirectly placed her in. Natasha is attached to the opposite sex and, happily married with child now, is content with being wife to a hard-working, often on-the-road husband. Tanya wishes to be independent of the opposite sex after years of believing that the opposite sex would define her and provide reason for her existence (being a mother provides solace now). All three women took similar paths to new destinations and Tal, who produces, narrates, and stars in the film, never judges their outcomes. Another sequel may soon be on the way. 

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