Filled with the violence and Orwellian unreality ruling eastern Ukraine, Sergei Loznitsa’s feverish procession of scenes is handled with steely control “What was that flying circus all about?” says one of the many dead-eyed, cynical functionaries in Sergei Loznitsa’s macabre new social-realist portmanteau movie about the civil war in eastern Ukraine; the film is set in the Donbass region. The echo of Monty Python is maybe deliberate. This man had just received a deputation from a devotional group wishing for cash for the public veneration of a certain icon, part of the religious nationalism that is fuelling the split between pro-Russian Putinites and independent Ukrainians whose sympathies are with Europe and the west. It is a vicious conflict in a place where there are still memories of the second world war, tribal loyalties concerning the Russia that saved Ukraine from Nazi Germany and fascism – but also, on the other side, the Stalinist terror-famine visited on Ukraine before the war. The extraordinarily prolific Loznitsa (whose previous picture A Gentle Creature was in Cannes only last year) has created a freakish kaleidoscope of bizarre scenes and nightmarish vignettes. Here is the horror, the violence, the bureaucracy and the Orwellian propagation of fake news and an eternal war hysteria to nourish patriotism. The scenes are fragments from an explosion of fear. This is the world of Novorussia, loyal to the motherland. Continue reading... |