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'Klondike': drama and absurdity in the run-up to the war in Ukraine

2023-01-27T10:59:29.988Z


Released barely a month before the Russian invasion, Maryna Er Gorbach's film is physically overwhelming and mentally poignant


“Is this really war?” asks a pregnant woman, who lives on a farm near the Russian-Ukrainian border in the Donbas region, stunned by what is happening around her.

As if wars didn't even look like wars anymore.

The absurd, the incomprehension, the hopelessness, the horror.

Those portrayed by the Ukrainian

Klondike,

Maryna Er Gorbach's third film as a director, a fiction that takes advantage of a real event to end up revealing a terrible symbolic charge through a face always exposed to the elements in the contests: that of the woman.

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The tragic historical circumstance that Gorbach recounts in his story is the accident in July 2014 of the Malaysia Airlines plane that was making the journey between Amsterdam and Kuala Lumpur, and which fell in the surroundings of Grabove, in the region of Donetsk, allegedly as a result of a missile launched by pro-Russian separatists in Donbas.

In reality, 298 people perished, including crew and passengers.

In

Klondike,

in addition, the catastrophe leaves a huge hole in the wall of the living room of the house of the protagonists, a couple of ranchers formed by the pregnant woman who hates the "fucking separatists" and her husband, one more separatist.

A civil conflict, that of Ukraine, in a microcosm of civil conflict, that of the couple.

Shot before the Russian invasion and released just a month before Putin's war broke out at the Sundance festival, where it won Best Director,

Klondike

has a visual and sound treatment of the landscape that's close to Western.

First, because of that concept of the border naturally associated with Western stories, and which is so relevant in Gorbach's story.

And second, because in the sequences in which the aridity of the land of an inhospitable place reigns in the frame, the accompanying soundtrack launches notes of an almost

country spirit,

torn strings for human beings without a horizon.

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Fixed shots (or with slight camera movements) stretched out over time to compose paintings of unusual pain dominate a work also endowed with a strange black humor that seeks to increase the absurdity of war.

A system that can be somewhat arduous for the impatient viewer who only seeks tragedy and coherence, but which is physically overwhelming and mentally poignant, finding an unusual ghostly spirit despite being an almost exclusively daytime film.

Dry and rough, with a violence that takes place outside the field when its vision is not necessary and within the frame when its torture seems essential, for example, with the two final events,

Klondike

leaves a devastating denouement in its most explicit and perfect aspect. in the most symbolic section.

These are the beginnings of a civil dispute that was always managed from Russia.

And a film that instills fear even in cows, and that bequeaths a brutal extrinsic fact: when you see it, know that one of the protagonists, Oleg Shcherbyna, who plays the woman's brother, is now fighting in the war as one more soldier

Klondike

Directed by:

Maryna Ergorbach.

Cast:

Oksana Cherkasyna, Evgeniy Efremov, Sergei Shadrin, Artur Aramyan. 

Genre:

drama.

Ukraine, 2022.

Platform:

Filmin.

Duration:

100 minutes.

Premiere: January 27.

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Source: elparis

All life articles on 2023-01-27

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