Donbass

Synopsis: Thirteen episodes which took place in Eastern Ukraine during 2014 to 2015.

In what appears to be set in some kind of Eastern-bloc Orwellian dystopia a group of low rent film extras are herded into an urban war zone in order to play “witnesses” on a bogus TV news report. From here writer-director Sergei Loznitsa's film chronicles a series of contiguous, sometimes loosely connected episodes that unless, at very least, you recognize the significance of the film’s title, particularly in the absence of a plot or identifiable protagonists, are going to mean little beyond a profound sense of alienation and spiritual despair.

“Donbass” refers to an industrialized region of Eastern Ukraine, an area that since 2014 has been the site of a bloody struggle between the European-oriented Ukranian government forces and pro-Russian, Putin-backed, gang-led separatists.

Loznitsa’s film is not a fiction but rather a kind of docu-dramatization of real events. Although evidently a shattering cri de coeur, rather inexplicably, he doesn’t make any attempt to explain the situation he is portraying for outsiders but simply presents these incidents as a kind of living nightmare. Whilst the result is a powerful film (he won Best Director in Un Certain Regard at Cannes 2018), this strategy is also rather limiting, and one that few not already familiar with the subject matter are going to want to subject themselves to, even if we can perceive in the idea of “fake news” a real connection via Putin to Donald Trump and America’s worrying embrace of anti-democratic values.

Whilst there are blackly comedic vignettes such a wedding that for grotesque absurdity is worthy of Emir Kustarica and one in which a woman lobbies a local politician for the means to display some holy relics she’s proposing to tour round the region, for the most part  Donbass is a dispiriting account of brutality, corruption and degradation in a world that apparently has lost all trace of humanity.

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