Donbass, unlike much of Ukrainian director Sergey Loznitsa’s previous work, is a feature film, not a documentary. But most scenes in the movie, which deals with the outbreak of war in the eponymous eastern region of Ukraine in 2014, ring sickeningly true.
As the Guardian’s Moscow correspondent at the time, I spent months in Donbass, from the first angry confrontations to the onset of full-fledged war, a bloody and fratricidal conflict with local causes, but fuelled by Russian money, weapons and troops. Loznitsa’s taut, dark vignettes are packed with types I remember vividly from the time I spent around the front lines with the separatist forces: the cheerful likely lads who seemed in over their heads, the wild-eyed psychopaths, the cynical suited overlords and the well-equipped Russian special forces directing matters while pretending to be locals.
The film opens with a group of crotchety actors having makeup applied in a trailer. But this will be no ordinary shoot – the actors are meant to play the victims of an imaginary Ukrainian shelling, providing invented but emotive subject matter to rally nationalist pride on Russian television.
The scenes that follow shift between absurdist noir humour and pure, distilled horror. The mood is set by the season in which the film is shot, the purgatory between winter and spring in which Donbass looks even more depressing than usual, piles of muddy snow melting on the potholed roads beneath slate-grey skies.
The spiral from social fission to confrontation and ultimately war is captured well. Actual violence is usually left to the imagination, but when it does come it is brutal and sickening. Perhaps the most gruesome scene of all sees a captured Ukrainian volunteer tied to a lamppost to be slapped, abused and roughed up by an increasingly furious mob. The scene, like most in the film, is loosely based on a real incident that took place during the war.
In another quite extraordinary vignette, a local businessman arrives at separatist headquarters: his jeep has been stolen and is being used by rebel fighters, but they’ve called him to inform him they have it and will return it to him. He is taken to the commander, who, full of jocular camaraderie, casually informs the man that he has been called in not to get his car back, but to have further money extorted from him. The slow, sickening realisation of the businessman of what he is now up against, as well as the commander’s terrifying manner, turning on a sixpence between warm entreaties and blood-chilling threats, are both portrayed marvellously.
Watching the film, I felt many of the scenes had been transposed directly from my memory bank on to the screen, particularly one episode in which dishevelled irregulars harass a foreign journalist, alternately abusing him and telling him to “write the truth”, an almost-daily ordeal while covering the conflict.
The film is marred, however, by a final scene that is so outrageous as to undo all the realism of the previous two hours. While the film is not a documentary, it’s clearly meant as an educational, truthful portrayal of the war, building scenes around events similar to real tragedies that occurred during the conflict. Inserting a horrendous, imagined war crime into the final scene feels like a betrayal of the realism.
And if the finale left a bitter taste in the mouth, there is a much more subtle but insidious problem that permeates the whole film: that it is possible to be truthful but not true, and that propaganda can function by omission as well as by distortion.
The Russian troops, the separatist violence and crimes, and the lies on Russian television were all very real components of the war. But there were other things going on, too, that Loznitsa doesn’t show us. The viewer of Donbass might be left with the impression that the only violence against civilians during the war was invented by Russian television. We see nothing of the poorly trained Ukrainian units firing shells at residential areas in clumsy and bloody attempts to target enemy fire. There are just the smallest hints at the real pain and loss in the region that Russian propaganda was able to exploit, and only the most oblique hints at the corruption and arrogance of local Ukrainian authorities that led to angry and disenfranchised populations in the east. Moreover, instead of compassion for these people, Loznitsa frequently shows them as a zoo-like mob of semi-humans. There is one drawn-out and grotesque wedding scene that seems to serve no purpose at all except to signal a class-baiting disgust at the lowlifes who were angry at the government in Kyiv.
It’s a shame, because this selective storytelling ends up making the film not entirely different from the numerous propaganda films about the war made for Russian state television, even if the Russian attempts are far more crudely distorted and made with markedly less cinematic talent. Donbass is a powerful and darkly beautiful piece of cinema, but it is only a partial rendition of the time and place it seeks to evoke.
• Donbass is out on 26 April.
