Review: War in Ukraine reflects deceit, division and corruption in black comedy ‘Donbass’

There’s no other antiwar film quite like “Donbass,” Ukrainian filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa’s brutally matter-of-fact, cynically comic string of vignettes depicting social destabilization in the titular war-ravaged region of eastern Ukraine. Amidst the bombs and bullets, Loznitsa’s tour of occupied areas — inside government offices, across battle zones, through a cramped bomb shelter and on tension-filled streets, with no central protagonist but a few recurring figures — reveals how many internal hostilities thrive inside a larger external one. Loznitsa’s bracketing scenes lay bare how a sense of shared reality is at stake, as we see citizens prepped like movie extras — complete with makeup trailer and a shouty production assistant — to give scripted “witness” on camera to very real bloodshed. A chatty, smiling crime boss explains away a doctor’s rampant supply theft to a maternity ward’s staff; Russian-speaking soldiers posing as locals treat a German journalist’s questions with laughing contempt; a man trying to reclaim his stolen car is instead convinced by the police it’s a donation to the war effort, which then morphs into an eerily funny, Kafkaesque cash-for-freedom scenario.