Director: Marina El Gorbach
Writer: Marina El Gorbach
Starring: Oxana Cherkashyna / Sergiy Shadrin / Oleg Scherbina / Oleg Shevchuk / Artur Aramyan / Evgenij Efremov
Genre: Drama / War
Country/Region of Production: Turkey / Ukraine
Language: Ukrainian / Russian / Dutch / Chechen
Release Date: 2022-01-21 (Sundance Film Festival) / 2022-07-17 (Ukraine)
Duration: 100 minutes
Also Known As: Klondike
IMDb: tt16315948
A heart-wrenching Ukrainian war drama. Marina El Gorbach's fourth work received the World Cinema Directing Award at last year's Sundance Film Festival, as well as awards in Berlin and Sarajevo.
The war in Ukraine has been ongoing for 18 months with no signs of stopping. But for those living in the most heavily affected areas, the war has been going on for even longer - in fact, over 9 years since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and separatist forces took control of the eastern Donbass region.
Director Marina El Gorbach's unsettling and captivating fourth work, Klondike (2022), reexamines that chilling period in recent Ukrainian history from the perspective of a couple preparing to welcome a child. Ilka (Oxana Cherkashyna) and Tolik (the late Sergiy Shadrin) live in the rural enclave of Kherabov, surrounded by the newly born war.
If the name Kherabov sounds familiar, it's because the village became a global news focus in July 2014 when a Malaysian Airlines plane was shot down by a Russian surface-to-air missile, resulting in a tragic crash. This disaster holds significant meaning for the film, although the story primarily unfolds within Ilka and Tolik's small farm as they strive to hold on amidst their torn lives.
Marina El Gorbach serves as director, writer, producer, and editor, using the couple's home as the main backdrop, like a theater stage with its walls torn open to expose the background. This happens in a striking opening scene of the film, where the two are intimately discussing Ilka's impending childbirth until a mortar shell explodes directly in their living room.
Collaborating with the talented cinematographer Sviatoslav Bulakovskiy, the director employs continuous shots in this scene and others, with the camera never ceasing its movement, as if she is capturing the events in real-time. This bold formal arrangement brings to mind Andrei Tarkovsky's final film, The Sacrifice (1986) (also a story of a disaster occurring in a countryside villa), as well as Hungarian director Miklós Jancsó's long take masterpiece, The Red and the White (1967).
In Jancsó's film, the fog of war often makes it difficult to discern who is fighting whom. The same sentiment permeates much of Klondike's plot, with residents of the Donbass region, like Ilka and Tolik, being forced to join the ranks of the separatists - some of whom are their neighbors - or flee while they still have the chance. However, stubborn Ilka refuses to give up her farm, which drives her increasingly desperate, hot-tempered, and alcoholic husband Tolik to try and save his wife and the future child.
Their unbearable plight is further intensified when Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17 is shot down over their house, with wreckage and victims falling directly into their front yard. The director cleverly uses the space off-screen and actions happening in the distance to depict this event, gradually allowing the audience to understand what is unfolding.
As many may recall, Russian separatists denied ever firing a missile at the Boeing 777, and Ilka and Tolik suddenly find themselves as witnesses, with their aggressors desperately trying to cover up the incident, putting the couple at even greater risk. They find themselves in the wrong time and place, but that is precisely what Klondike tells: ordinary people facing events beyond their control, pushed to the limits of human experience. They are ordinary people with ordinary problems, thrust into the extremes of human experience.
One of the most unsettling scenes in the entire film is when they drive a dilapidated truck - Tolik has been trying to retrieve the truck from the separatists to take Ilka to the hospital - through the arid Ukrainian landscape. Sitting in the backseat are a Dutch couple hoping to find their daughter's body, as she was on the crashed plane.
Like many scenes in this resilient and uncompromising drama, there is hardly any dialogue - in this case, the two couples do not speak the same language - and we can only immerse ourselves in the film's visuals. What we witness is two sets of people seemingly at opposite ends of life: one awaiting the arrival of a child, while the other has just lost their own. Yet, for a brief moment, they are intimately connected by the same conflict, as tragedy upon tragedy unfolds, and the innocent always lose what they have.