So much about being civilised!

Donbass (Russian/Ukrainian; 2018)
Written/Direction: Sergei Loznitsa

The other day, a day after Putin's army invaded Ukraine, posts on many Malaysians' social media posts read, 'Pray for Ukraine'. One should not have sleepless nights thinking of 'writings on the walls' like this, as it has become almost like a knee-jerk reaction to any world event. Nobody wants to ask why should we pray to an omnipotent God who was in a position not to let it happen at all in the first place. But yet, they convince themselves by alleging that great things are willed by Him, but the follies are only ours. His Grace will save us.

Hey, don't the Malaysians have a bone to pick with the Ukrainians? After all, it is above their airspace that our national carrier MH17 went down in 2014? Ukrainian pro-Russian freedom fighters allegedly shot the MAS plane with Russian firepower as determined by the multinational Joint Investigative Tribunal. So Ukrainians are not all at fault but Putin and the Russians? To date, nothing has happened. Putin denies everything. Family members have sued the airline for taking that war-torn route, but nobody can touch Russia.

MH17: What was left of it!

The recent Ukraine invasion has taught us that everybody in Russia is convinced that their reason for war is just. They bring in the pride of patriotism defending one's nationalistic spirit, ideology, free spirit or religion. They forget that, like what Lao Tsu had said, 'Nobody wins in a war!' This message is specially targetted to the layman in the street.s The leaders who stir the false sentiment can quickly flee from the country for political asylum. The public dies as martyrs to be immortalised as national treasures in monuments for crows to lay their excrements.

The current situation is more complicated than meets the eye. The world media paints a very one-dimensional narrative of the whole conflict - the badass communist infiltrating a young country newly escaped from the evil clutches of communism trying to be spread love in the free world! It is more complicated than that. 

The history of Ukraine goes way back before that of Russia. Whilst the Russian wasteland was roamed by nomadic tribes and barbaric horsemen, Ukraine already had a semblance of civilisational living which the Christian invader later labelled as pagan. Empires over empires split up this region over the centuries till it was usurped by the winning Red Soviet. The Reds wanting to maintain their hegemony started russifying the area. The Eastern part of Ukraine ended up with a large population who associated themselves with Mother Russia.

Wars bring out the best and worst of humanity!

After losing its communist mettle, Putin and his henchmen try to influence Ukrainian leaders with carrots. The citizens, still reeling from the tail-end days of communism, are reasonably contented with capitalism and the free spirit it had to offer. 

Now, the region is left with a zombie-like Neonazi faction of Ukrainian and Wagner's group of mercenary soldiers who do Putin's dirty work. 

Ukraine is now in the same position as a child caught between two divorcing parents. On one side, the West enticed them with business and bio-weapon laboratories. The Russian oligarchs brought in the mollah, but they centred it around Dondass and the eastern part of the country. The Western part ended up as rent-seekers depending on the Eastern industrialists. Now the helpers from both sides have washed their hands. To add salt on the wound, Ukraine, in the name of saving humanity from annihilation from a nuclear mushroom, have given up their nuclear facilities. Now they have to depend on the world's goodwill to stay afloat. 

This documentary was made in 2014 amid a civil war when Russians supported rebel groups that wanted to take the country. It is a kind of cruel caricature of war does, not to powers that be in the ivory tower, but to average Joe Public. Disruption of daily routine, loss of basic amenities, basic decency and lack of basic needs of life are not felt by the generals but by the man on the street. In the name of patriotism and wanting to defend a piece of cloth, they thump their chest to protect their land and send their offspring to the slaughter.

Love and marriage go on still!

It was a time when Russia annexed Crimea that a separatist group from the Donbas region tried to redeem autonomy from Ukraine with the help of the Russian army.

From time immemorial, people from this region have been fighting. From the time of the Kievan Rus to the Cossack to the reign of Catherine the Great to the Habsburg Empire, then to the World Wars and Soviet era, it has been just wars over wars. And the Caucasians have the audacity to consider themselves as higher beings ordained by God to civilise the coloured natives of their dark and demonic civilisations. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

No dialogue, no subtitles

The Tribe (Plemya, 2014; Ukranian sign language)

This must be a milestone in movie making. For the first time, we see a film done completely in sign language, no subtitles and no spoken dialogue. All the actors communicate through sign language. For your information, sign language is not universal. This one was done in Ukrainian sign language and boasts of 43 awards thus far.

It tells of a deaf young man who gets enrolled into a school for the deaf. He slowly gets involved in a web of mugging and pimping. A small group of 4 students and 2 girl moonshine after school hours in the bleak unstimulating freezing weather of Ukraine. Things get complicated when the new guy gets romantically linked to one of the girls.

Watching the film, one has to make a composite picture of what is happening. The director wanted his audience (both with hearing capability and those challenged) to appreciate it the same way. As the visual way is the only way to appreciate what it is going on, they must have decided to make it way too graphic - the elements of violence, sex and gore- than it needed to to lure audience, I suppose. I wonder if that is the reason it garnered international attention and accolades. Exposing everything and calling it bold is nonsensical.

The best documentary ever?

Man with a Movie Camera ( Человек с киноаппаратом, Silent; 1929)
Director: Dziga Vertov

In a BBC poll recently, this documentary from the silent film era got the nod as the best documentary film ever made. It is surprising that even with the modern investigative journalistic techniques and presentations, this Russian entry won hands down. And the best part is that there is no story, no plot, no actors and no inter-titling (the message that comes in between scenes to convey the unspoken words).

What the director is showing are his newly thought movie making techniques which were considered avant-garde at his time. The use of slow motion, panning, super-imposing, zooming and others are highlighted. He also tries to promote his 'state of the art' mobile camera on a tripod. His wife did an excellent job on editing.

The subjects were ordinary subjects from three Russian towns doing their daily chores like dancing, sleeping, cleaning, washing, commuting from the trams and even engaged in childbirth!
The director goes on exploring new daredevil and innovative cinematographic techniques like filming an on-coming train, filming from the undercarriage of a tram and burying a running camera in the sand as the train went over it.


Sometimes, he becomes cheeky and tries to equate our daily constitutional duties to our daily chores, e.g. washing the face is compared to scrubbing clothes! The director belonged to a group of filmmakers who were disillusioned with movies with fictional stories whom he feels is 'the opium for the masses'. As expected from the message above, he and his team became part of the team who became the mouthpiece of the Soviet regime to spread their ideology.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.