Donbass (film)
| Donbass | |
|---|---|
 Film poster | |
| Directed by | Sergei Loznitsa |
| Written by | Sergei Loznitsa |
| Produced by | Heino Deckert |
| Cinematography | Oleg Mutu |
| Edited by | Danielius Kokanauskis |
Release dates |
|
Running time | 122 minutes |
| Countries | Germany Ukraine France Netherlands Romania |
| Languages | Russian Ukrainian |
| Budget | € 2.5 million[1] |
| Box office | $78,133[2][3] |
Donbass is a 2018 internationally co-produced drama film directed by Sergei Loznitsa.[4][5] It was selected as the opening film in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.[6][7] At Cannes, Loznitsa won the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director, as well as the Silver Pyramid at the 40th Cairo International Film Festival. It was selected as the Ukrainian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, but it was not nominated.[8] It was filmed in Kryvy Rih, 300 km west of Donetsk.[9] At the 49th International Film Festival of India it received Best Film: Golden Peacock Award.[10][11][12]
Plot[edit]
The film's thirteen segments explore the mid-2010s conflict between Ukraine and the Russian-supported Donetsk People's Republic.[13]
Reception[edit]
Critical response[edit]
Donbass has an approval rating of 88% on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 43 reviews, and an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's critical consensus states, "Brutally powerful and brilliantly filmed, Donbass illustrates man's inhumanity with visceral effectiveness."[14] It also has a score of 74 out of 100 on Metacritic, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[15]
Awards[edit]
Loznitsa won the Un Certain Regard award for Best Director at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.[16] He also won the Silver Pyramid, also known as the Special Jury Prize for Best Director, at the 40th Cairo International Film Festival, tied with Thai director Phuttiphong Aroonpheng for Manta Ray.[17]
See also[edit]
- List of submissions to the 91st Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film
- List of Ukrainian submissions for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film
References[edit]
- ^ Blaga, Iulia. "PRODUCTION: Romanian Minority Coproduction Donbass by Sergei Loznitsa in Postproduction - FilmNewEurope.com". www.filmneweurope.com. Retrieved 31 October 2018.
- ^ "Donbass". The Numbers. Retrieved 4 December 2018.
- ^ "Donbass". Box Office Mojo. IMDb. Retrieved 7 November 2018.
- ^ "Donbass review – Sergei Loznitsa is cinema's ultimate bad time merchant". Little White Lies.
- ^ "Review: War in Ukraine reflects deceit, division and corruption in black comedy 'Donbass'". Los Angeles Times. 20 November 2020.
- ^ "The 2018 Official Selection". Cannes. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
- ^ "Cannes Lineup Includes New Films From Spike Lee, Jean-Luc Godard". Variety. Retrieved 12 April 2018.
- ^ Kozlov, Vladimir (29 August 2018). "Oscars: Ukraine Selects 'Donbass' for Foreign-Language Category". The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved 29 August 2018.
- ^ "Donbass, le regard de Sergei Loznitsa - Festival de Cannes". www.festival-cannes.com (in French). Retrieved 10 November 2018.
- ^ "IFFI 2018 to showcase 212 films". The Indian Express. Retrieved 8 November 2018.
- ^ History. "Film Sections". Iffi Goa. Retrieved 8 November 2018.
- ^ "49th IFFI to showcase 212 films, Israel in focus – The Shillong Times". Theshillongtimes.com. Retrieved 8 November 2018.
- ^ Weissberg, Jay (9 May 2018). "Film Review: 'Donbass'". Variety. Retrieved 1 September 2018.
- ^ "Donbass (2018)". Rotten Tomatoes. Fandango. Retrieved 10 October 2021.
- ^ "Donbass" – via www.metacritic.com.
- ^ Lodge, Guy (18 May 2018). "Cannes: 'Border' Leads Un Certain Regard Award Winners". Variety. Retrieved 18 May 2017.
- ^ Boas, Matthew (3 December 2018). "Álvaro Brechner wins the Golden Pyramid at Cairo with A Twelve-Year Night". Cineuropa. Retrieved 4 December 2018.
External links
MOVIES
Review: War in Ukraine reflects deceit, division and corruption in black comedy ‘Donbass’
People wearing cold-weather clothes line up in war-ravaged eastern Ukraine in the movie "Donbass."
People line up in war-ravaged eastern Ukraine in the movie “Donbass.”(Film Movement)
BY ROBERT ABELE
NOV. 19, 2020 5:50 PM PT
There’s no other antiwar film quite like “Donbass,” Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s brutally matter-of-fact, cynically comic string of vignettes depicting social destabilization in the titular war-ravaged region of eastern Ukraine. And yet, as the world grows ever more calloused toward propaganda-fueled division, official criminality and everyday armed conflict, we may need more films as bracing as “Donbass” to slap us straight about where this is leading us all.
Ukrainian nationalists and Putin-backed separatists have been at it in Donbass since 2014, but Loznitsa — a sometime documentarian (“Maidan”) with a taste for the austere and miserable — doesn’t spell out the conflict for the uninitiated. Instead he creates an aura of mistrust, strangeness and wretchedness throughout his 13 loosely connected episodes, adapted from the real stories of ordinary citizens.
Amidst the bombs and bullets, Loznitsa’s tour of occupied areas — inside government offices, across battle zones, through a cramped bomb shelter and on tension-filled streets, with no central protagonist but a few recurring figures — reveals how many internal hostilities thrive inside a larger external one. Lawlessness fights peace. History cripples progress. Civility wrestles with hatred. And perhaps most disturbingly, lies easily overwhelm truth. Loznitsa’s bracketing scenes lay bare how a sense of shared reality is at stake, as we see citizens prepped like movie extras — complete with makeup trailer and a shouty production assistant — to give scripted “witness” on camera to very real bloodshed.
What drives “Donbass” is the machinery of obfuscation smothering a gray, scarred world. A chatty, smiling crime boss explains away a doctor’s rampant supply theft to a maternity ward’s staff; Russian-speaking soldiers posing as locals treat a German journalist’s questions with laughing contempt; a man trying to reclaim his stolen car is instead convinced by the police it’s a donation to the war effort, which then morphs into an eerily funny, Kafkaesque cash-for-freedom scenario.
Filmed by the great Romanian cinematographer and frequent Loznitsa collaborator Oleg Mutu in long, patient takes that intensify each sequence’s brittle contrasts, “Donbass” coalesces into an unflinching dispatch from a state of embattlement both region-specific and 21st century-pervasive.
'Donbass'
In Russian with English subtitles
Not rated
Running time: 2 hours, 2 minutes
Playing: Available Nov. 20 on Film Movement Plus subscription service (free trial available)
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Donbass: A very dark comedy set amid an ongoing conflict
Review: The film comprises 13 equally cynical, comparably despairing vignettes
Donald Clarke
Donbass: There has rarely been a better example of universal truths being revealed through particular histories.
Film Title: Donbass
Director: Sergei Loznitsa
Starring: Tamara Yatsenko, Liudmila Smorodina
Genre: Comedy
Running Time: 121 min
Fri, Apr 26, 2019, 05:00
The latest film from Sergei Loznitsa – the Ukrainian director of diversely miserable films such as My Joy and A Gentle Creature – begins with scenes that will resonate with viewers throughout the world.
We meet a bunch of citizens apparently preparing for a film shoot. We appear to be in a recreation of a war zone. The work under construction is, in fact, an elaborate fake news segment focusing on supposed survivors of a “fascist” assault. The film’s internal truths turn out to be more horrible than those invented by the journalistic fraudsters.
A film-maker of no little ambition, Loznitsa constructs his film in form of 13 equally cynical, comparably despairing vignettes. The unavoidable topic is the conflict between Ukrainian nationalists and Russia’s proxy Donetsk “People’s Republic” in eastern Ukraine.
As is the way of anthology films, some segments work more effectively than others. But the desire to spread plague about both houses is maintained with impressive rigour throughout. There has rarely been a better example of universal truths being revealed through particular histories.
There is more here about the unreliability of the media (old and new). A woman who has been falsely accused dumps a hefty bucket of ordure onto a local official. A German journalist runs foul of soldiers who look to be Russians pretending to be locals. A man is tied to a pole in the street and taunted by a slavering mob.
Donbass offers some superficial similarities to Tales from the Golden Age, the state-of-old-Romania compilation with which Cristian Mungiu followed up 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days, and, sure enough, the gifted cinematographer Oleg Mutu worked on all three projects. His camera uses long takes to work its way among busy crowds contemplating terrible things. The energy offers some relief.
But this remains a very dark comedy that groans under the grim detritus of a still intractable conflict.
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Donbass
World Socialist Web Site.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/10/12/tff5-o12.html
The director of Donbass, Sergei Loznitsa, born in Belarus and raised in Ukraine, is a ferocious anti-communist and believer in capitalist “private property.” Loznitsa has made a series of mostly documentary short and feature films over the last two decades. He has also directed a few fiction films, including Donbass. (We will comment on one of his non-fiction films, The Trial, in the final part of this series.)
Like many right-wing artistic figures from the region, he thoroughly and unquestioningly identifies Stalinism and its crimes with socialism.
Loznitsa’s Maidan (2014), a documentary, was dedicated to the protests in 2013-2014 that brought the extreme right-wing, Washington-backed regime to power in Ukraine. We wrote in 2015, “The director presents these protests, which never involved wide layers of the population and were made use of by fascist elements, backed by the US and German governments, as a genuine ‘revolution.’”
The Event (2015) was edited from footage taken in St. Petersburg during the abortive coup attempt in 1991 by elements within the Stalinist bureaucracy. In a comment about the latter 73-minute film, which primarily shows crowds milling around a public square, we noted: “The speakers who address the crowd are without exception reactionary, anti-communist demagogues. Prominent among them is the mayor of St. Petersburg, Anatoly Sobchak, a pro-free market politician and mentor of Vladimir Putin, who left the country in a scandal in 1997. A Russian Orthodox priest also gives his medieval blessings to the protests.”
Loznitsa’s new film, numerous titles inform us, takes place in “Occupied Territory in Eastern Ukraine,” that is to say, the regions (now “People’s Republics”) with millions of ethnically Russian citizens that broke away from Ukraine after ferociously anti-Russian, ultra-nationalist forces came to power in 2014.
Loznitsa stages a series of 13 grotesque, surreal vignettes purporting to demonstrate that the “People’s Republic” is a cesspool of corruption, extortion and political hypocrisy, where obviously Russian troops in one scene pretend to be locals, where mobs set on ordinary enemy soldiers as “fascists,” where “fake news,” including “fake atrocities, is regularly organized by the authorities, etc.
The misanthropy and cynicism on display are corrosive. Nearly everyone involved is a liar, a monster, many of them potential killers.
In his director’s note, Loznitsa asserts, “The action of the film takes place in the Donbass, a region of Eastern Ukraine, occupied by various criminal gangs. The fighting is going on between the Ukrainian regular army, supported by volunteers, and separatist gangs, supported by Russian troops. …
“The situations and circumstances, which seem to be absurd, grotesque, even comic, and almost impossible to imagine, do happen in real life. … They happen because the iron logic of the underworld, which affected all those generations born and bred in the catastrophe, that was the USSR, dictates its own rules.”
Loznitsa blames the war in Eastern Ukraine on the fact that the collapse of the Soviet Union and its “project of the future” could have been followed by either “a fundamental reform and complete re-organisation of the society, or by its continuous gradual decay and destruction.” The first option would mean the creation of “a European model,” including its emphasis on the “protection of private property,” while the second involves “the return to the totalitarian Soviet mode of existence. … Ukraine, at least the predominant part of its population, chooses the European way, whereas Russia is rapidly moving back to the USSR.”
The reader will probably get the general picture. A miserable outlook here produces a miserable film.
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