War in Eastern Ukraine: "Donbass"

Cinema World Tour, Film #60
Country: Donetsk People's Republic (Donbass)/ Ukraine

Watched in: Kolkata, West Bengal, India

Rating: 7/10

Sergei Loznitsa won as Best Director in Cannes' category Un Certain Regard. Did he deserve it? In my eyes, Yes... and No. First, let me explain a bit the background:
The seperatist war in Eastern Ukraine is a very difficult topic. I've read and researched a lot about the conflict, but it's extremely hard to say who's right and who's wrong. As I am a huge supporter of Ukraine's pro-european movement (watching this film after Loznitsa's Maidan is definitely a good choice), I am obviously quite critical when it comes to this seperatist movment which is backed by Russia. But on the other hand: it's the decision of the people who live there. Always. If the people there feel more connected to Russia, then Ukraine shouldn't try to fight against this will. The best would be – concerning ALL struggles for indepence worldwide - if those regions could gain their independence in peace. The solution is not to fight whether the territories in the Donbass are Russia or Ukraine, the solution would be to let them create the states of Luhansk and Donetsk without any influence from any side. Then, these Donbass states could have peaceful relations and open borders to both Russia and Ukraine. Same goes for the conflict right now in Nagorno-Karabakh, which I've visited last year: fighting over the question whether the territory is Armenia or Azerbaijan is absolutely pointless and only kills the locals (who nobody cares about anyways). The only solution is to let the region NKB create it's own, completely independent republic, Artzakh – with open borders to both sides. This would be the solution for each and every independence conflict, just to listen to what the locals want. But obviously, these solutions will never become reality as long as the states who claim the territory have power and financial interests.
The situation in Luhansk and Donetsk, where this film is set, is a bit more complicated as it's difficult to tell if really all locals want independence from Ukraine or if the conflict is extremely manipulated by Russia. I tried to visit the People's Republic of Donetsk last year, but made it only to one town not far behind the border, before I couldn't go on. So I couldn't speak to too many locals, and those who I did speak to told me many different perspectives, sometimes pro, sometimes contra Ukraine.

Anyways, after this very long introduction (which was actually just meant to say: it's a difficult topic) a review of the film in short words: Donbass is a very good film. It consists of episodes – I didn't count but it might be around 11 or smth – which are cut together in a masterful way. Whenever an episode ends (often filmed in amazing super-long shots), the ending of that episode creates the beginning of a new fragment. Some of them are way over the top, definitely recognizable as satire. Sometimes they are extremely hard to watch, some contain very violent scenes – maybe not a lot of blood etc., but I am rather talking about the unbearable hate we see on screen. There is one single-shot episode in which an Ukrainian soldier is exposed to the public in the streets of Donetsk. Slowly, the locals get more and more angry and almost kill the soldier – who's actually just a cook - in the end.
The film might mostly work as a satire, but Loznitsa often fails to walk the thin line between satire and propaganda. There's one episode in which the army of Donetsk confiscates a local businessman's car. When he rightfully points out that this is theft and tries to get it back, they threaten him with a prison sentence. This episode is definitely one of the weakest ones as Loznitsa clearly isn't funny here anymore, it's simply pro-Ukrainian propaganda. Even with you disagree with the methods of the army of Donetsk, even if you hate Russia and want the PRD and PRL to remain a part of Ukraine: this scene is completely unrealistic and shows that Loznitsa wanted to portray the people of Donetsk in an extremely bad way here. They try to free Donetsk for the sake of the people, even if a very bad person is in charge, they wouldn't steal someone's car in that way.
Nonetheless, in most scenes, Loznitsa manages to find a good balance and doesn't drift of to much into an anti-russian hate speech film. There is for example one terrific scene with a German journalist trying to find out who's in charge at an army checkpost, probably the film's best scene. In most other scenes, Loznitsa asks us: what is true, what not? What is just manipulation by the media, what actually happened?
In one extremely clever scene in a bunker, we first see people saying how bad they live, how miserable their living conditions are. First, we pity them, and think that these are the people who suffer the most: the ones who don't want the war, the ones who just want to live in peace. Then, one old woman's rich daughter arrives, and changes the whole situation: she tells her mother that in reality, everything is fine, there are no shootings, that it has no sense to stay under the earth in miserable conditions. We get sceptical: so what is actually true? Is it actually dangerous outside or not? At the end of that episode, we see how the people in the bunker watch the news, and these news show a faked attack on a bus – we saw in the very first episode of the film how these news have been faked and filmed to make the people believe that Ukraine is still attacking them. This is clever, clever filmmaking.
And this also shows one of many conflicts main problems: the lack of information – which is also true. When I've been in Eastern Ukraine, nobody could actually tell me whether it's possibly or not to travel to Donetsk's capital. Nobody could tell me if there still shootings or not. Iraqi-Kurdistan's film Turtles Can Fly treated the same topic: Iraq is in a war with the US and the West, but nobody actually knew what exactly is going on as many people neither had a TV nor spoke English.
Furthermore, Donbass is a good examination of what nationalism transforms people into. How nobody actually cares about the locals, how the media is faked and hate the new language.
The film is sometimes a bit too obviously a work of propaganda (which wouldn't even be a problem if Loznitsa would give us good arguments for his side), but Donbass is still an extremely interesting and very unique film.