Donbass

Sergei Loznitsa cites Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom Liberty as an influence for this episodic narrative. In the Donbass, a region of Eastern Ukraine, a hybrid war takes place, involving an open armed conflict alongside killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs. Here war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth, and hatred is declared to be love. A journey through the Donbass unfolds as a chain of curious adventures, where the grotesque and dramatic are as intertwined as life and death. This is not a tale of one region, one country, or one political system. It is about a world lost in post-truth and fake identities.