Echoes of the recent past: on “Maidan” and “Close Relations”
All across the post-war years, non-fictional cinema proved, time and time again, that it was not only useful towards capturing the immanent semblance of the countless sociopolitical events that marred the past eight decades, but also its role as a means to understand the present through the lens of the past – a role all the more vital when major contemporary events are highly traumatic and complex. Yesterday, the war in Ukraine entered its second month – a dark milestone, that seems just as unreal as the 24th of February felt, signifying the short time frame in which tens of millions of lives have been irrevocably altered. Now that a new phase of the conflict seems to loom – that of a stalemate, as the advance of the Russian invasion has been fiercely fought off by the Ukrainian resistance –, one that might be even bloodier, it’s paramount fur us to understand what has happened in Ukraine since 2013, until we once more accommodate, for the second time in the last couple of years, to a horrific “new normal”. Maidan (dir. Sergei Loznitsa) and Close Relations (dir. Vitaly Mansky), two films screening in the „DAFilms for Ukraine”, are of the kind that is capable to give pertinent answers to the question of how we arrived here. In a certain sense, both of the filmmakers behind these works are controversial right now: born in Soviet Ukraine, Mansky became a Russian citizen after the fall of the USSR, and is, as such, implicitly affected by the blanket bans of Russian films that various festivals and cinematic forums have implemented in the past weeks; and Loznitsa has just been expelled from the Ukrainian Film Academy by opposing said blanket bans, a scandal which my colleague Victor Morozov discussed in-depth in his editorial on the images of the war. This gives me an even more compelling argument to discuss these films.
Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.
