Sergei Loznitsa. Photo from personal archive.Inspired by propaganda videos about life in the unrecognised republics in Ukraine’s Donbas, Sergei Loznitsa’s feature film Donbass is Ukraine’s nomination to the 2019 US Academy Awards.
In comparison with The Distant Barking of Dogs, a Danish film that tells the tale of a young boy from a village outside the southeastern city of Mariupol, these two films narrate the conflict in the Donbass in diametrically opposed ways. If The Distant Barking of Dogs is a life-affirming story against all odds, then Donbass, in the words of Loznitsa himself, is a story about disintegration: “These are all consequences of the Soviet Union. We are talking about disintegration. We are living through a breakdown – of the individual, of morality. And we are trying in some way to resist it.”
Many Ukrainian critics saw Loznitsa’s film as a vivid illustrative tale of hatred and propaganda, a film that shows the surrealism of war and the surrealist reality it provokes.
