Klondike (2022) is a remarkable piece of art-house cinema, which has not only established Maryna Er Gorbach's reputation as director but attracted significant international attention to contemporary Ukrainian cinema. It premiered at Sundance Festival, where it won the World Cinema Dramatic Competition for directing, and then went on to win second place in the Panorama Audience Award Category at the Berlinale and over three dozen other awards at prestigious international competitions. To be sure, its success stems from its topicality—Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine—but also its cinematographic finesse and superb acting.
Set in the early months of Russian-sponsored military hostilities in the Donbas, an absurd and at times darkly comical universe ravaged by lawlessness and obscene violence, the film offers a grueling exploration of the repercussions of war among the civilian population, particularly women. Klondike's plot revolves around an expectant couple, Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and Tolik (Serhii Shadrin), who live on a remote farmstead near the Russian border. Irka and Tolik delay evacuation until it is no longer possible to escape the war.
The couple's life spins out of control when Russian-backed occupiers shoot down Malaysian Airlines flight MH17, which crashes in a nearby field, killing all 298 passengers. The real-time event occurred on July 17, 2014 and caused an international outcry. Yet Klondike does not dwell on either politics or images of slaughter. It focuses instead on Irka's and Tolik's escalating marital tension amid broader political processes, connecting the personal with the national and global. It offers a series of representative bits of tragic reality, which produce what Roland Barthes called “the reality effect”: boosting veracity without gruesome visuals. Shot in long takes with a stationary and slow-panning camera that keeps characters in mid-distance, if not off-frame, the film depicts horror with cold candor. Its deliberately detached, verité style forces viewers to grapple with their own imbrications with the depicted events and the structures that made them possible.
The MH17 catastrophe might be the film's deadliest explosion, but it is neither the first nor the worst. The first is a “friendly” mortar misfire that blows out an exterior wall in Irka's and Tolik's house. While setting in motion the main conflict of the story, spiking Tolik's anxiety and sending Irka into survivalist mode, the gaping hole opens a spectacular pastoral vista, which becomes the film's default view—rife with iconographic significance. Klondike's focus on the pastoral is a classic move to gauge the carnage of war, which has famously been classified as “the ultimate antipastoral.” The magnificent wide-screen cinematography and washed-out color palette of the rolling agricultural panoramas also evoke familiar landscapes of the lawless frontier of American Westerns. As Er Gorbach observes, she purposefully framed Irka as a western protagonist caught between two sematic poles—a Donbas cowgirl poised between savagery and civilization, at home in the wilderness but naturally inclined toward justice and kindness.
The most salient of Klondike's intertextual references is to Dzyga Vertov's hypermasculine and industrialized representation of the region in his experimental film Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbass (1931). While embracing Vertov's Cine-Eye theories on the observational camera and its potential to unveil hidden truth, Er Gorbach resists his cinematic vision of the Donbas as the industrial heart of the USSR. Her serene camera foregrounds the feminine and lingers on nature, making it clear that there is more to the Donbas than its Soviet legacy and industrial might. Images of a broken pram, a slaughtered cow, scorched sunflower fields, overbearing clouds, and Dovzhenko-style close-ups on Irka's profile set against the majestic landscapes that populate the film's mises-en-scène offer further recognizable references to the classics of Soviet Cinema, helping Er Gorbach to forge an alternate visual vocabulary of post-Soviet Donbas, while showcasing her aesthetically rigorous artistic foundations.
Klondike's most agonizing explosion is the breaking of Irka's water that sends her into labor in the film's closing episode. While constructed originally as a cathartic moment designed to bring a glimpse of hope in the otherwise somber story, the finale reads differently in our post-Bucha times: harrowing reports of Russian war crimes suggest to global viewers that Irka's and her newborn child's chances of survival are next to none. Klondike is not an easy watch, but it is one of the most gripping and elegantly made films of new Ukrainian cinema, which has rapidly assumed the responsibility for bearing witness even to the worst of war.
