Tag: Donbass

Inner Wars

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

As Inner Wars reminds us in its final post-script, Ukraine has been at war with pro-Russian separatists since 2014. It is a war without end, without resolution and without many resources; occurring in a far corner of Europe that is easy for people in the West to forget about. The Donbass region has experienced endless death, squalor and misery, with at least 13,000 people dead.

Many images of this war paint it as a male endeavour — think the unforgettably bleak images of Sergey Loznitsa’s Donbass (2018)— but hundreds of women have also made their way to the front lines. Once there, they face two enemies: the pro-Russian separatists and the patriarchal structure of the Ukrainian army.

Both an urgent and brave piece of war journalism — one scene literally capturing the filmmaker encamped in a cramped house under shellfire — and a contemplative look at the survival of femininity within a harsh, masculine world, Inner Wars uses its three protagonists to paint a broad and affecting picture of Ukraine’s female fighters.

They are the chain-smoking and cheery Elena, nicknamed The Witch, who followed her lover to the battlefield; Lera, a mortar commander, protesting against the dreadful conditions of her camp; and Iryna, a veteran who lost two of her legs and one of her eyes in a mine accident. They might be bound by the same struggle, but their relative levels of command within the military shows off the multifarious nature of war.

As the title suggests, the focus isn’t so much on the battle against the Russian separatists, but the internal struggle these women face for acceptance in a patriarchal society. Unlike the all-female squads that exist in Kurdistan, captured in Eva Husson’s Girls of the Sun (2018), these women are usually one of a few within a male battalion, working twice as hard to command the same respect as men. We don’t hear contemporaneous male perspectives at all (a lot of the time their off-hand comments aren’t even subtitled), a useful and moral choice that puts these women’s experiences front and centre.

Director Masha Kondakova immerses us in the battlefield — while we don’t see any action itself, we get up close with the resistance forces existing within such a depressing world. But it’s in Kyiv itself where the documentary finds its most combative moment: a distraught and bitter Iryna challenging Kondakova about her true intentions behind the film. It’s fascinating that this combative exchange is kept in, showing an ethical messiness to the documentary form that other filmmakers might choose to smooth over.

The prioritising of portraiture over projecture gives the film its steady power, buoyed by intimate handheld frames and a minimalist synth score. While the larger war is likely to carry on for some time yet, Inner Wars shows that at least some progress can be made by honouring the contributions and bolstering the leadership roles of some of its most dedicated combatants.

Watch Inner Wars online and for free during the entire month of December only with ArteKino.

Donbass

Posted on by victorfraga

The War in Donbass is now five years old. In March 2014, protests by various pro-Russian and anti-government groups took place in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of the country, which are collectively described as the Donbass region. More than two thirds of the population of Donbass are ethnically Russian, and Russian is the de facto language of region. The protests quickly morphed into an armed conflict, and Moscow has been repeatedly accused of supporting the separatist struggle (something which they deny). Donbass is a fictionalised account of the conflict divided into 13 very peculiar and mostly unconnected segments.

The film has some very good moments. An angry mob humiliates an alleged “exterminator” tied to a lamppost in a town square in broad daylight. They punch him, they kick him, an old woman beats him up with a stick, they shout profanities. They demand answers, but the man simply refuses to speak. A woman dumps a bucket of faces on the head of a newspaper editor who wrote an article stating that she received a large bribe. She wants him to feel as dirty as she did (when the libel was published).

A German journalist is confronted about Hitler and his “fascist” past. The separatists too are often described as fascists. A well-dressed woman tries to convince her haggard mother to leave an overcrowded shelter in favour of a safe and salubrious dwelling, but she refuses to budge (presumably in solidarity with her people, or attachment to the land). The images of the filthy and jam-packed shelter, with the walls covered in mould, are very realistic. And so on.

The first two thirds of Donbass feel a lot like a documentary, until the movie descends into the farcical and allegorical in the last few segments. A very peculiar wedding takes place (pictured at the top). This is the ugliest and also most absurd part of the film. The ceremony is conducted under the flag of Novorossiya (literally, “New Russia”, a proposed accolade for separatist entity). The guests laugh. No one is taking the sacrament seriously, particularly the bride and the groom. It’s as if the director was saying: “a union between Russia and Donbass is laughable, hideous and extremely undesirable”. This is an anti-war movie and a very anti-Russian statement. Loznitsa is Belorussian by birth, but has studied and lived in Kiev most of his life, and his affiliation clearly lies with the Ukrainian government, who also helped to finance the film.

Donbass is interesting enough to watch, and the anti-war message is is very clear. But it also gets a little confusing. Nothing is contextualised (the information in the first paragraph of this review is not described in the film). It’s not always possible to determine which side is side. Perhaps I lack the cultural and political knowledge. Or perhaps the director intended to confounds his viewers in order to emphasise the pointlessness of war. I’m not entirely sure. One way or another, the outcome is a little disjointed and incoherent. At more than two hours of duration, the narrative gets jumbled up. Overall, Donbass lacks the lyrical excellence of Loznitsa’s previous film A Gentle Creature (2017). And it also lacks the punch-factor. The violence, the explosions and murder sequences feel a little contrived and banal.

Donbass won the Best Director prize of the Un Certain Regard section of Cannes International Film Festival in 2018. It is out in cinemas across the UK on Friday, April 26th, and then on VoD on Monday, April 29th.

Flight of a Bullet

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a single-take film, but nothing like Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002) and Sebastian Schipper’s Victoria (2016). There were no actors, no rehearsals and no preparation of any sort. This is a completely spontaneous documentary. Similar to what would happen if you turned on the camera on your phone and followed those around you for about 80 minutes. Except that this is 2015, in the middle of the Donbass conflict.

The film opens with a black screen populated with the sentence: “Life lasted only while camera was on, so I kept it rolling”. This suggests that the filmmaker’s life was endangered. A bridge has been blown open by separatists, and a heavy lorry has nearly collapsed into the river. It’s unclear whether there were any casualties. A man called Maxim films the dramatic event with his own telephone. A bullet is heard, balaclava-clad policemen demand to see everyone’s papers. They arrest Maxim for interrogation on suspicion of separatism. The filmmaker Beata jumps in the car with the police.

The second half of the film is far less dramatic, as the police reach the conclusion that the man is not engaged in separatism. The interrogation becomes far more friendly, as Maxim provides them with useful strategic and geographic information about the region. He draws a map and diagram on a chalk board hardly discernible to viewers. He is then released and Beata is left to film the young soldiers in the now disbanded military base of Aidar, a voluntary military defense battalion. About a third of the film consists of Beata filming a half-naked soldier having a mundane talk to a friend on the telephone. Not particularly thrilling.

Flight of a Bullet is a marketed as “provocative study of how the violence of conflict permeates into the mundanity of the everyday”. But this is only a study of violence as far as watching strangers talk on the street is a study of mankind. There is limited elicitation technique, little technical wizardry and absolutely no artistic merit. Beata remains behind the camera and hardly speaks, except for a few moments when her motives a questioned and a very creepy sexual proposition, suggesting that she could be raped.

Ultimately, this is a piece of guerrilla filmmaking, and a very random fragment of a very complex conflict. The film is not contextualised at all, so it’s up to viewers to put the pieces together.

Flight of a Bullet + Q&A with the director Beata Bubenec takes place as part of the Open City Documentary Film Festival in London between September 4th and 9th. This is the type of movie that could be fascinating and generate a very thought-provoking debate in the presence of the director, or if you are very familiar with Ukrainian lifestyle and parlance – but almost entirely meaningless otherwise.

The separatist question has not been resolved, and the armed struggle in Donbass is still ongoing to this date. There have been reports that one of the film subjects is now dead, which has raised many eyebrows and brought the accountability of the filmmaker into question.