This film was released on Friday 26th April 2019 and is no longer screening.

EXCLUSIVELY AT IFI.

Since 2014 the war in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine has been raging between pro-Russian separatists loyal to Putin and nationalists who sympathise with Europe and the west. Memories of World War II and Stalin’s purges and famine lie close to the surface, regardless of alliances, and a neutral position is not an option.

Constructed from thirteen distinct yet thematically linked episodes, Sergei Loznitsa’s corrosive, formally daring new film alternates between wryly satirical depictions of state corruption, media manipulation and the cynical fabrication of fake news to confrontational vignettes that unsparingly examine the atrocities of the conflict at a human level.

Winner of the Un Certain Regard Best Director prize at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival, Donbass is an act of protest against barbarity, corruption and inhumanity.

(Notes by David O’Mahony.)

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