Director, screenwriter:If the name Hrabove rings a bell, that’s because the village made world news in July 2014 when a Malaysian airliner tragically crashed there after being shot down by a Russian anti-aircraft missle. That disaster looms large over, whose action is otherwise restrained to the small farm where Irka and Tolik struggle to hold on while their lives are torn asunder.
Working with gifted cinematographer Sviatoslav Bulakovskiy, Er Gorbach shoots that and other sequences in one continuous take where the camera never stops moving, as if she were capturing events in real time. The formally audacious setups recall those in Andrei Tarkovsky’s final movie,In Jancsó’s films, the fog of war is so thick that it’s often hard to tell who’s fighting whom.
As many recall, the Russian separatists denied firing a missile at the 777, and Irka and Tolik suddenly find themselves witnesses to an event that their aggressors are violently trying to cover up, putting the couple even more at risk. Talk about being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And yet, that’s very much whatis about: how a regular pair of people with regular problems are driven to the absolute limits of human experience by events beyond their control.