'Donbass': darker, more militant, and more grotesque

Donbass is darker, more militant, and more grotesque than Russian director Sergey Loznitsa’s earlier work (Maidan, A Gentle Creature).

In thirteen vignettes, he shows us what life is like in the Donets Basin. In this region of eastern Ukraine, there is a simmering war that cannot flare up without dramatic geopolitical consequences. We do not see the conflict itself. Rather, Loznitsa focuses on the total societal collapse: corruption is rife, there is not a scrap of decency, and news items are shamelessly staged.