This Ukrainian cheerleading squad for older women keeps going as bombs fall

Mariia Ponomarova started pre-production work on her documentary Nice Ladies — about a Ukrainian cheerleading team for women over 50— back in 2019. She had sketched out the arc of the film, found production partners and was set to start shooting principal photography at the team's home base of Kharkiv in March 2022. 

Then, Russia launched a full-scale invasion in Ukraine. Everyone's lives got turned upside down. And Ponomarova wound up making a very different film from the one she'd initially planned. It's a film with two distinct parts: the first half of the film follows the team as they train for the European Cheerleading Championships, perform on Ukraine's Got Talent and celebrate birthdays together.

The second half of the film focuses on one particular Nice Lady, Sveta Stopina, as she adjusts to her new life in Amsterdam and leans on her long-distance teammates to help her get through the war. 

Ponomarova is from Kyiv, but has lived in Amsterdam since 2014. Shortly after the invasion, Stopina asked Ponomarova for help to get her and her family to the Netherlands. Stopina and her husband, daughter, grandsons and cat came to Amsterdam soon after.

Ponomarova hadn't planned to make a film with a main character because she wanted to show the diversity of older women's experience. But due to the constraints of the war and Stopina's proximity, she mainly filmed her. 

"That [the war] was defining everything else," Ponomarova says. "It's just physically impossible if you're making a film about 10-plus characters to create an almanac about every other person in the film."

Nice Ladies made its international premiere at Hot Docs on May 1.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you have to adapt the film when the Russian invasion of Ukraine began?

The "a-ha" moment that there must be still a film — and this is a very dear scene to me in the film — is when Sveta remains training [in Amsterdam].

This whole thing with her was not even visual, but when I heard her counting [her steps for her routine], I think the power in her counting — how she was pushing through and counting further — that gave me the indication that there will be a film. I will just need to reshape it. 

That was very inspirational. If she's pushing through, then I'll be pushing through. 

I read that Nadia, who was team captain at the time, had her own ideas about how the film should be made. What did she want the film to look like

It was very, very hard to convey what a creative documentary is. There are Ukrainian-created documentaries and cinemas in Ukraine, but mostly in the festival circuit.

At some point, there was an idea that I'm just going to do a grand commercial, a long appraisal of them being so cool. 

Indeed, I would want to highlight them and their power and their energy, but for me it was always about going beyond. If not for the invasion, the plan was to go into your personal stories, into your personal struggles. That's also how I briefed them in the beginning. 

I think for some of them it was quite challenging to accept that the invasion deprived us of all of all these plans, of all these aspirations to make a film about a lot of subtleties, and that I needed to readapt the film.

I think it was frustrating for those who stayed in Kharkiv and saw the film in February. It's about really seeing what's going on. It's always hard to accept how big of a damage the Russian Federation deals to us and dealt to us and keeps on dealing. 

You know it's there and you feel it, and it tears you apart, but you'd rather not see it, right in front of you. You'd rather stick to the good messaging, like how unbreakable you are —that despite everything, you push through. 

You film some of the Nice Ladies team at a cheerleading showcase in Riga, Latvia in 2022, after the war has begun.  

There's an extremely tense conversation there between Sveta, who's living in Amsterdam by then, and the rest of the team, who have remained in Kharkiv. The women on the team say that Sveta doesn't understand what they're going through because she's not living through the invasion. What was it like to film that? 

I think it was very good to know that if this is a conversation that's happening there, this conversation most probably happens in so many other collectives, within so many other communities, within so many other families. 

Sveta was there. They [her family] were in Kharkiv for the first week, then they escaped to Dnipro, then from Dnipro they went to the border. It's not that Sveta didn't experience it, she's been sitting in the bathroom under the bombings. It's that she doesn't experience it continuously, as others. 

It's all an effect of trauma. Trauma of displacement is not in competition with trauma of bombardment, of the trauma of living in a country where atrocities are happening every day. So the amount of pain is so huge, that it's very easy to start trying to measure it, who has it more.

They tried to find the common ground, or common language. It's just that it's not easy. 

By sharing this conflicting moment that happened in Latvia between them, they're opening up to what happened to all of us, or a lot of us. By seeing their tension within each other, a lot of people would at least see that this tension exists. 

There is this image of a solid, Ukrainian society that is so unbreakable and united. It is what we are — and we will be fighting to the end, we are very resilient. But it costs us. That's what I tried to portray within that scene. 

Correction: An earlier version of this article referred to Sveta Stopina as a refugee, a legal status she does not have in the Netherlands. That has been corrected.