He wants a big chocolate cake for his birthday. And a job on a cruise ship. For a young boy, roaming the war-torn streets of the Ukrainian town of Odesa seems like an adventure – or an escape from reality. Elsewhere, men are rebuilding the destroyed houses and churches, as inhabitants continue their busy hustle through the city.

For her documentary When Lightning Flashes Over the Sea, which has screened in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale, director Eva Neymann creates a kaleidoscope of impressions, of characters that inhabit the city, have fled to it, and have to deal with the daily threat of an air raid. “We need one victory between us,” a man says, quoting a popular song. “It’s a Russian song,” another one points out. Lines are drawn in the sand, all while normality tries to persist.

When she is not quietly observing the street life, Neymann is interviewing residents, giving them time to explain their experiences. A middle-aged woman, a refugee from Abkhazia, is working as a cook, while her son is stuck in a different part of the country. A clergyman, sitting on a park bench, recalls knowing “what it is like on the other side”. An elderly woman, who has lost family to the war, is now taking care of the stray cats in the city. A Jewish Holocaust survivor tells stories of the past, her memories echoing present events and vice versa; as she keeps switching to Yiddish to recount these memories, she talks about surviving a designated shooting in 1941, while also mourning her sister. “We were waiting for them to kill us,” she remembers. Waiting, like the Ukrainians are now waiting in limbo for what will happen to them. Neymann makes memories and dreams of the past a recurring and unifying factor. The Abkhazian lady dreams of the house her mother grew up in, longing for it, knowing she’ll likely never see it again. The old cat lady keeps thinking of her husband and her fallen son, who died six years earlier. 

Parenthood is quietly baked into the fabric of this story. “I don’t want my son to die,” the Abkhazian woman says. Not for these governments. “They were never there for me.” In another part of the city, a father is struggling with two sons on different sides of the front. One “can’t be against the war, the madness”, the present one says. It’s an attack against a climate that wants the conflict to carry on, no matter what.

Yet, amongst all this destruction, there are moments of life, and glimpses of a future: playful sequences where cats climb on Neymann’s video equipment and on buildings; a wedding seen through a window. On the other hand, there are air raids, an almost alarmingly ordinary occurrence – there is no rush on the streets to get to the shelter. While Neymann succumbs to certain lengths in these moments (some of the interviews and the street scenes could have been tightened), When Lightning Flashes Over the Sea is nevertheless a beautiful impression of a town between the ropes, for whom the war is omnipresent and yet is a frontline in the distance.

When Lightning Flashes Over the Sea was produced by German outfit Blue Monticola Film.