Born in Feodosia, a Ukrainian city on the Crimean coast, Vladlena Sandu moved to her mother’s home town of Grozny in Chechnya when she was only six. Blue skies and cerulean waters dominated her childhood, but as the Chechen–Russian conflicts erupted into full-blown wars during the 1990s, she experienced terror, bloodshed, and death. Sandu pours these traumatic memories into her feature debut, a hybrid documentary portrait that doubles as cinematic exorcism, where the demons of the past are transformed into striking collages and vignettes.

Across staged tableaux infused with theatrical flourishes and surreal abstraction, reality is superseded by childlike imagination. Adults are largely absent from the frame, although their harmful influences remain. A giant red cake painted with Lenin’s face conjures the ideological education Sandu received at school, while her grandfather, who would chase her with an axe when he was drunk, is represented as a pair of bloodied hands clasping a quivering baby chick. These images – both childlike and mythological – are accompanied by Sandu’s diaristic voiceover. Spoken in present tense, the events of the past acquire a stunning urgency.

While the early section of the film blooms with a similar vibrancy to Sergei Parajanov’s melancholic reveries, Sandu’s teenage years take on the tones of Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical contemplations. The childlike capacity of a young girl to navigate her painful circumstances with a sense of wonder has hardened into jaded acceptance. Sandu frames this loss of innocence not merely as an individual tragedy, but a collective one also. We find out that her grandfather, too, had been a child of political oppression; his father, Sandu’s great-grandfather, was sent by the Stalin regime to the gulag. The film’s final images align the gaze of her younger self with those of countless other children, a provocative juxtaposition that foregrounds the invisible casualties of war.

• Memory is at the ICA, London from 6 August.