Klondike Review: Ukraine’s Oscar entry by director Maryna Er Gorbach

A camera pans slowly in a modest cozy living room. Here is the kitchenette with microwave, coffee maker and jars of freshly preserved tomatoes. Here are the inherited cupboards, one full of the finest china, one full of books. And now here is a wall that no longer exists. Torn plaster and broken wood frame a great portal to the rolling steppe. There is a single road across these meadows. It leads to Russia.

Dateline July 17, 2014 in the Donbass region of Ukraine, where local separatists are joining forces with the Russian military and various mercenaries to wage an insurgency. Small farmers Tolik (Serhill Shadrin) and Irka (Okshana Cherkashyna) were bombed a few days ago. Irka is heavily pregnant and comes to rest with the driven instinct of a bear. Lying in bed, they try to deny their situation. When it’s over, says Irka, we’ll make a big window out of the hole like they did in Europe. With underfloor heating, says Tolik. You walk around barefoot.

Unfortunately, there won’t be much time for that. Tankers roll down the only street; There is an anti-aircraft gun there, big enough to shoot down a passenger plane. According to TV news, they can watch Tolik repair their broken electronic devices. Hundreds of people have died for the sin of flying through the air in an argument.

But when Tolik urges his wife to go with him to a place without war, she doesn’t want to hear him. All Tolik wants is a quiet life. Irka just wants to stay in her house. Your hormones are raging. She becomes angry when she sees her husband surrendering to Sanya, the arrogant local Separatist leader he has known since childhood. Sanya takes her car. He then tells her cow to feed the local troops. Give them the chickens, he says. You take them anyway.

Maryna Er Gorbach thought about it Klondike, Ukraine’s entry for the Foreign Language Oscar, is sad, wise and tense. Tolik knows that he, his wife and unborn child can only survive thanks to Sanya’s unreliable protection, especially when Irka’s hot-tempered younger brother Yaryk (Oleh Scherbina) arrives from a fight in Kiev and accuses Tolik of defecting to the Separatist side. Mercenaries are everywhere, scouring the ruined sunflower fields for planes. These treeless agricultural plains were filmed in Turkey; DOP Sviatoslav Bulakovskiy takes inventory with the same slow grind he fires at the cracked walls of the house.

Without going into further detail, Gorbach presents the hurling of the invaders and their irregular intrusions into the local community as just one manifestation of a general aggression. This aggression is directed at women, animals or anything else in their sights, but especially women.

When Tolik tells Sanya that he should have beaten him more often in their childhood home, Sanya laughs mockingly and tells him to go home and beat his wife. Was he always full of macho swagger, or does it come with every Kalashnikov for free? Sure enough, misogynistic battle talk permeates her babble, hardening into cruelty the moment a small group of mercenaries burst into her home just as Irka’s water breaks and demand that she cook for them. The way they laugh as she stumbles through the kitchen dripping and moaning to get her plates.

However, none of this is easy to observe Klondike confident in his conviction. It speaks to the integrity of a filmmaker who reaches through fiction to reach for a deeper truth – or rather, a fictional reality, as an early cover tells us it’s based on a true story.

The central message and understanding – that war is hell – is certainly not a new revelation. However, there could hardly be a better time to reflect on how this chaotic conflict, dividing families and pitting neighbors against each other, would lead to a regional war that would collapse the fragile international agreement that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall , would crush. Thanks to the great performances of the three main actors, we see the personal cost of this breakup in each picture. It is an approach to knowledge that is very rewarding, no matter how boring it feels.