I was fortunate to attend a documentary film festival in Cyprus and watch Anastasiya Miroshnichenko’s Welded Together (2025).

It tells the story of Katya, a 21-year-old welder from rural Belarus who grew up in an orphanage. Her father died when she was around five or six, and after his death her mother began drinking heavily. Eventually, her mother was deprived of parental rights, and Katya was sent to an institution. The film opens with Katya, now an adult, finding her mother living in Brest, in a rented one-room flat, making chebureks at the local market whenever she is sober enough to do so.

Katya also discovers she has a little sister, Amina, no older than one and a half or two years. She decides to leave the tiny room assigned to her by the orphanage in the village of Radost and move in with her mother, hoping to find a new job — and perhaps, though unspoken, much more.

Was she hoping to finally reunite with her mother? To rebuild a family? To receive some love, warmth, and stability? To save her mother from alcoholism? To help raise her sister? Or perhaps to discover who she herself really is?

Instead, Katya finds herself sacrificing her personal life, staying home with little Amina while her mother disappears for days on drinking binges. She misses work because there is no one else to care for the child. She spends her wages not only on feeding herself and Amina, but also her mother’s frail drinking companion who also lives in the cramped apartment. And rent still has to be paid.

The film ends with Katya’s agonizing decision to hand Amina over to social services, who promise to place the child either with foster parents or in an orphanage. Katya is told this may give Amina a chance at a better future, perhaps even a loving family. Katya could in theory adopt Amina herself — but only if she had a husband, stable work, and her own housing. In other words: not now. Even more painfully, if she surrenders Amina, she will lose all right to see or visit her again.

Why? Because that is what the law dictates. Although they are half-sisters, Katya and Amina are, legally speaking, strangers, since Katya’s mother had been stripped of parental rights. Katya is tormented by questions: Can she decide her sister’s fate? Can she betray her mother? Can she choose herself? Can she still remain human in making such a choice?

On the surface, this seems like yet another social drama — how many mothers have been stripped of their parental rights, how many children sent to orphanages? But beneath the surface, this is a film about the inability to metabolize psychic trauma, about the incapacity to bear and work through pain that is handed down across generations.

In psychoanalytic terms, the capacity to contain another’s emotional experience — to transform chaos into something meaningful — is called containment. Katya lacks this function, just as her mother does. More than that, her mother actively destroys the potential space for growth, both her own and that of her daughters. In her presence, chaos and anxiety only intensify.

Katya’s attempt to care for her younger sister can be seen as an unconscious effort at reparation — a wish to mend what has been broken, to piece herself together through the act of caring for another. But as clinical experience shows, genuine reparation is not possible without primary intrapsychic integration.

Katya, however, remains fragmented, with an unintegrated trauma that makes her “mission” effectively impossible. And so she continues welding metal with precision and skill — she even competed in the contest “Best Welder of Belarus” — because unlike her psyche, the metal can indeed be welded together.

The most harrowing element of the film is not only what happens, but how it is told. There is no commentary, no explanatory voice-over, no guiding interpretation — just the raw documentary chronicle of relentless despair. The viewer is left alone with this unbearable hopelessness, in psychic isolation, forced to endure the same experiences as the protagonist, and to process them without mediation. This makes the film a unique clinical phenomenon, where form and content fuse into a single structure — welded together.

This is not a film one merely watches — it is a film one must withstand.

I keep thinking about the metaphor of welding, about fire as a kind of glue for metal. Two pieces of iron are heated until their edges soften like plasticine. They are pressed together, and once the metal cools, a seam is formed; the two pieces become one, as if they had always belonged together. If only the human psyche followed the same laws...

P.S. A brilliant idea and execution by the director. There is no need to invent a fictional story for a feature film — one can simply enter an (almost) any real family and capture the raw documentary of life itself.