Tag: Ukraine

The Natural History of Destruction

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM CANNES!

The Natural History of Destruction asks a simple question: is bombing civilian populations justified in the name of war? It seems to be the only question in the film, asked again and again and again, as Sergei Loznitsa shows us endless images of the mechanics, banality and brutality of war: leaving endless, merciless destruction in its wake in search of a bigger cause. Ostensibly about the allied bombing of Germany — which is estimated to have killed between 350,000 to 635,000 people while crippling the country’s armaments production — the film’s timely premiere resonates in the current moment, with Russia’s campaign of terror demolishing cities in Ukraine as this review is being written.

Created exclusively with archive footage courtesy of both British and German collections, Loznitsa’s latest is a WW2 film that feels contemporaneous, mixing black-and-white observational footage with painstaking re-recordings to show us the total dehumanisation of war.

We start with sketches of everyday German life, people out and about in town, heading to biergartens and cafes, singing songs and going to work. Evening arrives, the picture zooms out and these scenes are reduced to momentary lights in the ground, strikingly light up by the advent of cluster-bombs.

I didn’t just see Rostock, Lübeck, Cologne and Berlin while watching this film. I saw Mariupol, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia. Further back, it evokes NATO campaigns in Baghdad and Belgrade, or Putin’s levelling of Grozny, all committed in the name of the “greater good”. No matter who is waging war and who is on the so-called right side of history, the final effects are the same: dead people, flattened buildings, the complete vanquishing of hope and humanity.

Occasionally the silent-film-like images are punctuated by speeches. One British army official asks the German population to simply leave the cities and camp out in the countryside, a simplistic solution that betrays the reality of living in a country during the war. He goes on to say that although a campaign of bombing on this scale has never been tried before, it will make an “interesting experiment.”

And while war historians might agree that the bombing itself was justified in that it ground German production to its knees, allowing Soviet Union and American forces to sweep in and take Berlin, absolutists can claim the moral high ground: no victory could possibly be worth this much death and destruction. But Loznitsa avoids any editorial process — no talking heads, no narration, no moral grandstanding — and allows us to come to our own conclusions; starting debates instead of finishing them.

It’s this complexity, as well as seeking the humanity in a people that overwhelmingly supported the Nazis, that make him a complex figure. Only recently was he kicked out of the Ukrainian film academy for his ties to Russia and for speaking out against a widespread boycott, while at the same time, many of his fiction films have also been accused of Russophobia. In my view, this controversy is probably the sign of an independent filmmaker.

One thing you can say about Loznitsa is that he’s both a deep thinker and a prolific filmmaker (this is his third documentary in two years). Nonetheless, clocking in at just under 110 minutes long, his images are exhaustive and enervating, at once deeply terrifying and rather monotonous. His documentaries, like Victory Day, which stretched to over an hour despite only having enough material to justify a 20-minute short, has the habit of just making the same point over and over again. While the intention is to conclusively batter home the horrors of aerial warfare, the length and duration of certain images, which repeat themselves without revealing any new layers, struck me as unnecessary. The deeply-felt moral question the film raises is a highly important one, making it even more disappointing the finished product makes this such an alienating picture to sit through.

The Natural History of Destruction plays in the Official Selection as a Special Screening at Cannes. No UK release date yet.

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.

Stop-Zemlia

Posted on by Redmond Bacon

QUICK SNAP: LIVE FROM BERLIN

Is there any stronger feeling in the world than the flush of first love? There probably is, but try telling that to a teenager who finds themselves awkwardly infatuated, unable to hide the blushing in their cheeks? Masha (Maria Fedorchenko) is one such teenager, who has developed a crush on the quiet and sensitive Sasha (Oleksandr Ivanov) — in a pivotal scene, simply walking by this boy and trying to say “hi” is a moment of stress seemingly on par with living in a war zone.

A teacher explains how the stress activator in your brain turns on and admits that falling in love can create much the same effect. Stop-Zemlia has a similarly forensic approach to both the psychological and physiological emotions of being a teenager, when your hormones are rampant and your emotions impossible to fully explain. Masha finds comfort in the kind presence of her friends Yana (Yana Isaienko) and Senia (Arsenii Markov), who form a trio based more on platonic love than any potential for romance.

Coming in at an unwieldy two hours, Stop-Zemlia uses a longer-than-normal runtime for this genre to fully explore the contours of teenagehood, dipping in and out of musical sequences, magical realism and intersecting storylines; even allowing Masha’s love interest full autonomy instead of mere idealisation. Fictional scenes are intercut with documentary-style interviews, with characters asked questions by an unseen director, allowing for further development of their feelings and more mature development of their emotions. Characters’ names are almost the same or simply diminutives of their actors (Masha for Maria, for example), blurring the lines between performer and character to excellent effect.

Coming at a time when coming-of-age dramas are so saturated with copious smoking, drinking and shagging — such as Russia’s Everybody Dies But Me, UK’s Skins and USA’s Euphoria — Stop-Zemlia offers a far more thoughtful and sober take on the messiness of growing up. In this respect, it owes as much to recent trends in French documentary-making — the films of Sébastien Lifshitz and Claire Simon’s Young Solitude — than stereotypical coming-of-age films. There’s a great eye for dialogue that genuinely apes that way that generation Z teenagers talk — and not the way that many adults assume they talk — showing off the patient and workshopped approach of first time feature director Kateryna Gornostai.

The fluidity is sexuality is explored here with real sensitivity, showing the rise of a generation far more nuanced and mature than even my generation; in fact, what seems to matter more than sexual expression is simply being honest with yourself and understanding what you want to be. There is the larger context of growing up in Ukraine, one of the poorest countries in Europe, where opportunities are scarce and men have to join the army once they turn 18. In one touching scene, Senia recoils when he attends a class explaining how to load an AK-47, remembering his traumatic upbringing during the conflict with Russia. It’s a difficult place to be an adult, with these teenagers — thoughtful, kind, confused, learning as they go along — under no false impressions about what the future might bring. Stop-Zemlia captures them at this most precarious age with great empathy and precision.

Stop-Zemlia plays in the Generation section of the Berlin Film Festival, running from 1st to 5th March.

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.

Frost (Šerkšnas)

Posted on by victorfraga

A Lithuanian man meets two Ukrainian men. But this is no ordinary meeting – the Lithuanian man has just narrowly avoided being shot at after almost driving through a military checkpoint in the Donetsk province (in Donbass, the predominantly ethnic Russian region of the Ukraine, central to the Ukrainian Crisis of 2013/14). Auteur Šarūnas Bartas’s tenth feature film Frost takes us on an 1,800 km road trip from Lithuania to eastern Ukraine. Along the way, it provides a gorgeously-landscaped meditation on the cold complexities of war and national identity.

The film opens with a brief street conversation between Rokas (Mantas Jančiauskas) and an unnamed friend. The friend has been voluntarily delivering humanitarian aid to Ukrainian soldiers in the Donbass conflict, but is unable to deliver the next batch. He asks Rokas to drive to Kiev and drop off the cargo with some other volunteers. Without much consideration, Rokas agrees and takes his girlfriend Inga (Lyja Maknaviciute) with him. They drive to the Polish-Ukrainian border, where a journalist Andrei (Andrzej Chyra) helps them to enter the Ukraine. After discovering that the Kiev volunteers have moved on, Rokas decides to take the long – and perilous – journey to Donetsk. Along the way, he stays with Andrei and assorted journalists in Dnipro, meets some sombre soldiers in the Donbass borderlands and finally arrives on the fractured frontline.

These three meetings are essential to Rokas’s intellectual development and the film’s broader commentary around war. The first meeting in Dnipro displays the worst excesses of international conflict journalism. In typical Bartas style, Rokas stays largely silent when Andrei introduces him to the group of war correspondents and photographers. However, his sullen suspiciousness indicates that he is ill at ease sipping wine and whiskey in an upmarket hotel, when there is a humanitarian mission to fulfill.

The second meeting in a makeshift Donbass military outpost is deeply moving and switches the mood into hyperreal docudrama. The scene involves an inquisitive Rokas talking to two weary Ukrainian men about the nature of war. The two men are soldiers, inasmuch as they wear uniforms, and are tasked with removing dead bodies – friendly and enemy – from the battlefield. The dialogue is expertly played in a way that throws up the utter moral dilemma of war, without being a preachy lesson in ethics. Indeed, the two men are not actors, but actual soldiers and this contributes to the striking authenticity of the conversation.

By the time Rokas is on his way to the final meeting, his inquisitiveness is starting to get the better of him. Rokas is now using his phone to film and take photos of the destruction of Donetsk province. It is initially unclear whether Rokas is transitioning from a naïve volunteer to a roving war reporter. However, his subsequent interactions with soldiers on the frontline suggest a morbidly voyeuristic fascination with the conflict. Ultimately, Rokas comes full-circle and is as much an out-of-touch tourist as the journalists he previously despised.

The film acts primarily as an exploration of war from the bubble of an EU perspective. This is both eye-opening and positively human, as each character displays an entirely familiar range of virtues and vices. It also broadcasts Ukraine and the Donbass crisis to an EU audience that have now largely forgotten about the fortunes of their largest European neighbours. Although Frost doesn’t detail the experiences of the Donbass separatists, it leaves you with no doubt that the everyday allegiances of this war are arbitrary and ambiguous. Where documentaries such as Netflix’s Winter on Fire (Evgeny Afineevsky, 2015) are incredibly informative, yet brazenly biased, Frost gives space for the viewer to independently appraise their position.

In spite of this, the film can feel somewhat ponderous when Rokas and Inga are on the road. This is largely a result of Inga’s diminished role and Rokas’s unclear motivations. It’s possible that Rokas exists as a young, multilingual and rudderless conduit for Lithuanian national identity. It’s also possible that Rokas exists as a blank slate for the viewer to project their own interpretations onto. Nevertheless, the feeling pervades that developed dialogue between Rokas and Inga could have given a sharper narrative touch. Bartas is known for stripping his early films of dialogue and narrative. But in a film where other characters’ talk clearly drives the story forward, the silence between the central couple is decisively deafening.

Frost is a unique piece of cinema in 2017. It focuses attention back onto a divided region that has become absent from the popular European imagination. Likewise, it provokes meaningful reflection on the moral dilemma of war, without being overtly instructive. Its slight tendency for tedious travel is punctuated by powerful prose in the three key interludes. It ends on a low-key whimper, but one that will explode through your thoughts long after the end credits.

Frost is showing as part of the ArteKino Festival, an entirely free online film fest taking place between December 1st and 17th. You too can view it at home by clicking here.

Sarunas Bartas is one of DMovies‘ favourite filmmakers. His early 1997 film The House, which is entirely devoid of narrative and dialogue, is a constant source of inspirations for our dirty work.