The invasion of Ukraine by Russia has aroused a media fervor that often presents this humanitarian disaster without proper contextualization to clarify how it got here. And that has enormous risks, including citizen misinformation, which can generate a wrong idea from “explanations” that are found without a filter. which will generate fractures between positions that will prevent reaching common conclusions that should be obvious.
The Ukrainian Sergei Loznitsa has warned about this misinformation on several occasions, especially in the film that is becoming more relevant these months. ‘Donbass’ takes us into the bowels of the upheaval in the breakaway region of the country, contentiously divided between pro-Russians and supporters of the Ukrainian government.
But the director is not so obsessed with telling the truth about this war, but instead show the consequences of lies told around said war, which gives an extraordinary value to this work that we can see in Filmin.
When war destroys the human condition
To show us all this, Loznitsa renounces a particular narrative thread, opting instead for a series of 12 vignettes or episodes that reflect different situations experienced by the inhabitants of the region. They are not documentary portraits, an art that the Ukrainian has practiced several times in the past, but are presented as fictional sequences, although seven of them are based on real videos that the director found on YouTube.
One of the first vignettes we find is that of a group of actors in a trailer going to the scene of an attack, where they must cry before the cameras for a propaganda job for Russian television, creating a breeding ground to justify the support of the Kremlin to separatist militias. With this start Loznitsa presents us the importance of misinformation in this whole conflictand how this is going to generate a cascade of heartbreaking dehumanization, corruption and violence.
‘Donbass’: tragic humor in 12 episodes
Other episodes show us cruel moments perceived in a banal way by those who carry them out, from manipulations presented as institutional truth to physical violence perpetrated by several individuals on a Ukrainian prisoner tied to a post by pro-russian forces.
Far from what it may seem, it is not a continuous exploitation of misery, but there is room for a black humor that makes this bitter drink digestiblelike the moment when a man seized his car and the Russian militias ask him for money in a natural way, with a lightness that disguises the threat.
These moments of humor, tinged with an air of desperation, help reflect the nonsense and How far can power go to strip dignity from those it wants to subdue?. Not all segments work equally well, but even so, Sergei Loznitsa leaves a remarkable job, which earned him the Best Director award in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes 2018. And it also shows his unequivocal commitment to the pain of his country already time to warn of the imperialist desires of the Russian representatives.