Donbass (Movie)

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    Documentaries That Examine Russia’s War in Ukraine

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    After the death of Russian dissident Aleksei A. Navalny, these four movies examine the war in unexpected ways.Veselka, the Ukrainian diner on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, is one of the few restaurants in the city that truly deserves to be called venerable, even iconic. Mention it to most anyone — especially those of us who were here around the turn of the 21st century — and it provokes pierogi- and borscht-inflected rhapsodies, happy memories of a late-night tuck into a steaming plate of Ukrainian comfort food.Veselka has also become a center for New York’s support for embattled Ukrainians, as shown in Michael Fiore’s new documentary, “Veselka: The Rainbow on the Corner at the Center of the World.” (David Duchovny narrates.) Veselka’s third-generation proprietor, Jason Birchard, is of Ukrainian ancestry, and many of the staff are from the country as well. When war broke out, the restaurant started collecting money and clothing to send to the front; what’s more, Birchard began helping staff sponsor family members in their efforts to move to safety in America.The film (in theaters now) starts as a fun story about a New York institution, and its tone is resolutely hopeful and convivial. But it rapidly becomes a demonstration of a community’s efforts to support loved ones under siege, and that makes it much richer and fuller than it might otherwise have been. If you know Veselka, you might choke up a bit.I happened to be watching “Veselka” the day news broke of dissident Aleksei A. Navalny’s death in a Russian prison, which is not the same story but certainly related. I wrote about “Navalny,” Daniel Roher’s Oscar-winning documentary that covers his opposition to Russian President Vladimir V. Putin, and thought of other films that help illuminate the war in Ukraine years into the struggle.“Donbass” (streaming on the Criterion Channel and Kanopy) is Sergei Loznitsa’s darkly absurd comedy that elliptically pokes miserable fun at the way ordinary people become caught up in propaganda, violence and systems of repression, specifically in eastern Ukraine. “Donbass” isn’t technically a documentary (there are actors and a script), but Loznitsa often makes nonfiction, and elements threaded throughout this film blur lines between fiction and nonfiction, making you wonder what you’re actually looking at.“A House Made of Splinters” (rent on most major platforms), directed by Simon Lereng Wilmont, was nominated alongside “Navalny” at last year’s Oscars. It’s an observational film, set in an eastern Ukraine home for children who are separated from their parents. Through their eyes, we gain a new view of the bleak human factors that spring up in wartime — violence, drugs, poverty — and that suggest, with an almost unbearable gentleness, the generational repercussions to come.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Donbass’ Review: War in Ukraine, the Prequel

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      Sergei Loznitsa’s film, completed in 2018, presents an absurd, horrific tableau of cruelty and corruption.Sergei Loznitsa’s “Donbass,” which opens in American theaters today, is not exactly a new film. It was an Oscar entry in 2019 after making its debut at the Cannes Film Festival the year before, and the events depicted onscreen — fictionalized recreations of things rumored to have really happened — take place a few years before that, in the wake of Russia’s 2014 invasion of Eastern Ukraine.Watching it now, as reports of Russian atrocities in other parts of Ukraine dominate the headlines, is unnerving in a way that’s hard to put into words. The movie’s timeliness is obvious enough, and its prescience carries, at least for this viewer, a jolt of shame. The images of what was happening then provide a prologue to the horrors we are witnessing now — and amount to an unheeded warning.Could a wider audience for “Donbass” have made a difference before this year? Can it make a difference now? Probably not. Art isn’t a lever that moves history, but a lens that shapes perceptions of it. Certain narrative works, novels as well as films, provide illumination different from what might be found in journalism or history. Loznitsa’s nonfiction features, including the recent found-footage documentary “Babi Yar: Context” and the eyewitness chronicle “Maidan,” are to some extent explanatory, examining the causes and consequences of war and political upheaval.“Donbass,” at once brutally satirical and grimly compassionate, focuses on the subtleties and grotesqueries of human behavior. Loznitsa paints sprawling tableaus of cruelty, corruption, vulgarity and lies through a series of intimate vignettes.In an early scene, a government meeting is interrupted by an angry woman, flanked by cameras, who dumps a small tub of excrement on an official’s head. The raucous, profane free-for-all that ensues turns out to be a model of civil discourse compared to what comes later, but it also sounds what will be the film’s dominant notes.This is a place — identified as “Occupied Territory” in the flashes of text that introduce each scene and called “Novorossiya,” or New Russia, by some of the characters — where violence and absurdity commingle, where chaos is wrapped in bureaucratic punctilio and ceremonial pomp. (Loznitsa and his crew, including the brilliant Romanian cinematographer Oleg Mutu, shot the film in and around the central Ukrainian city of Krivoi Rog). There is a sly anarchy in Loznitsa’s methods: He wanders, with deceptive casualness, from episode to episode, leaving one story in the middle to follow a stray character into the next.Starting and ending in a television hair-and-makeup trailer, he takes us to a maternity hospital, a Ukrainian border checkpoint, various militia outposts, a crowded bomb shelter, a bus stop and a wedding. We meet a lot of people, often without catching their names, and observe interactions that range from ridiculous to infuriating to unspeakable. The mood is unstable. Amusement gives way to unease; disgust melts into dread, anxiety into despair. This is a tour of hell, and a reminder that hell is other people. The discomfort comes from the sense that we know these monsters. We are these monsters.“Donbass” isn’t easy to watch: A scene in which soldiers lead a prisoner into the street to be humiliated, harassed and then beaten by passers-by is particularly excruciating. But the movie bristles with caustic humor and moral rigor. The separatist fighters and pro-Russian citizens who dominate the action are held up for censure and ridicule, yet are also given a fair hearing when they paint their adversaries as fascists.Do they really believe it? When reality is distorted by authoritarian propaganda, cynicism can be impossible to distinguish from sincerity, and opportunism can masquerade as righteousness. That sounds abstract, but the movie’s bitter achievement is in its granular, ground-level concreteness. It’s horrific, impossible, extreme — and also understated.DonbassNot rated. In Russian, Ukrainian and English, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 2 minutes. In theaters. More