Donbass

In the Donbass, a region of Eastern Ukraine, 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 drama 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. It is about each and every one of us.

The action of the film takes place at Donbass, occupied by various criminal gangs. The fighting is going on between the Ukrainian regular army, supported by volunteers, and separatist gangs, supported by Russian troops. It is a hybrid war, happening alongside an open armed conflict, accompanied by killings and robberies on a mass scale, and a gradual degradation of the civilian population. The film is a revealing portrait of a region in disrepair, threatened by extortion on all sides, plagued by corruption and survival of the fittest. A region in which local residents are simply trying to survive, surrounded by heavily-armed men in camouflage, and stuck between checkpoints where danger is omnipresent. A film that depicts horrendous realities that are as satirical as they are dramatic.