Campfires, tents, barricades, armoured vehicles, masked soldiers, enraged crowds chanting slogans, pictures of the fallen on the walls, coffins being unloaded from a car. The restless camera captures flags, preferably Russian ones or the one of the Donbass People’s Republic, rarely the Ukrainian one (and only on the enemy’s side). People everywhere talk of peace, but the facts say: war. The disturbing snapshot of an anarchic chaos that once wanted to be freedom.

Grit Lemke

Over the past few years, Vitaly Mansky’s own voice has found its way into his films again and again. He is a laconic commentator, deliberately factual and yet not without emotions. He wishes he had never been forced to make this film. This is how “Rodnye (Close Relations)” begins, his report of the eventful year between May 2014 and May 2015. For the Ukraine – the subject of the film – it was the most important year since World War Two ended: an ongoing political earthquake that left no stone standing and – to stick to the metaphors of social seismography – opened deep rifts between the people. Mansky’s balancing act does not lead to just anybody but to his nearest relatives. His birthplace in Lviv is the starting point of a journey that has much to offer. Surprise: his mother speaks Ukrainian; his great uncle is still alive – in Donbass! But also disappointment: the aunts – one of them living in western Ukraine, the other on the Crimea – have stopped talking to each other. And shock: his cousin’s son was drafted, which in late 2014 carries a deeper meaning.

Mansky himself has now moved out of his home near the Kremlin and lives in emigration, like so many others. There’s no place for nostalgia in his still disintegrating “home country”, his film teaches us – an attempt to approach the issue by a man who’s deliberately growing more and more estranged.

Barbara Wurm

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Nominated for MDR Film Prize

Her face is a landscape of cracks and furrows, her voice deep, rough and sensual. She smokes, drinks, is gruff – and her former and present – in her own way – beauty and pride still shine through. Nina Antonova was a film star in the former Soviet Union and more than that, the muse of Anatoliy Bukovsky, a very busy director, workaholic and charismatic. They were married for 48 years. He is the gap in the film, for he died in 2006. What’s left are the Order of Lenin and a lot more “metal” that can’t be found in this flat cluttered with memories of former triumphs that came between mother and son. There was no place for a child then.

Serhiy Bukovsky’s answer to the world of masks, premieres and red carpets was to become a documentary filmmaker who now points his camera at his mother. He bathes her in soft light, traces tender traits, and confronts her. The scenic arrangements vacillate between devotion and dismantling, staging and confrontation. Everything is put to the test. Oedipus light. “Forget Stanislavski”, he calls – to an actress playing the role of a mother.

Cornelia Klauß

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Nominated for MDR Film Prize