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| Images courtesy of Samuel Goldwyn Films |
Ukrainian writer-director Maryna Er Gorbach, married to
Turkish filmmaker Mehmet Bahadir Er, has primarily co-directed films with her
husband for Turkey including but not limited to the 2009 comedy Black Dogs
Barking before moving on to Love Me and Omar and Us. But following the ongoing 2022 Russian
invasion of Ukraine, the Ukrainian filmmaker moved up to the director’s chair
in her first effort as a writer-director with her recurring creative and
personal partner moving back to the position of producer while rejoining forces
with their cinematographer Sviatoslav Bulakovskiy for the startlingly timely
and arresting Turkish-Ukrainian co-produced Klondike. A testament to maternal instincts prevailing
over wartime hardships, this widescreen panoramic film isn’t interested in the
ongoing conflict so much as it is in what drives someone amidst it all to stay
put in a dangerous situation. Like so
many other Ukrainians before the central protagonist, she doesn’t want to leave
even at gunpoint.
Reeling back to 2014 at the very beginning of the ongoing
conflict, the film set in the village of Grabove, Donetsk region near the
Russian border consists of three primary characters: pregnant wife Irka (Oksana
Cherkashyna), her beleaguered husband Tolik (Serhiy Shadrin) trying to appease
his stubborn spouse and her younger brother Yurik (Oleg Shcherbina) from
Kyiv. Beginning with the happy but
anxious couple in their bed as they mull over renovating the house when the
infamous Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 plane crash which killed nearly 300 people
occurs outside of their home, leaving a gaping hole in the frontage of their
house. As separatist militia members
pass through their farmland home with cattle, Tolik is forced at gunpoint to
kill and sell off his cow meat for soldiers while younger brother Yurik tries
desperately and unsuccessfully to pry his older sister out of their crumbling
home.
A bit like an Andrey Zvyagintsev, Jonathan Glazer or Nuri
Bilge Ceylan film with its naturalistic running long takes observing familiar
turmoil as a microcosm of an entire populace and uncompromising forays into
bleakness, the Turkish-Ukrainian coproduced Klondike is less interested
in politics or logistics than it is simply intensely trained on the plight of
an ordinary expectant mother trying desperately to carry on daily routines as
pandemonium erupts all around her. Shot
in Turkey with support of the Ukrainian State Film Agenvy as well as the Ministry
of Culture and Tourism of Turkey, the multi-national co-production includes
work from Bosnian sound designer Serjan Kurpiel and Georgian composer Zviad
Mgebrishvili who serves up a profoundly depressing and hopeless score. The film also so happens to be produced by
Sviatoslav Bulakovskiy who served as the film’s cinematographer who captures
the increasingly decrepit and somber war-torn settings with mannered
symmetrical beauty. Somehow or another
Bulakovskiy and director Gorbach find unlikely beauties amid the unfathomable
horror.
Oksana Cherkashyna goes all the way out on a limb here as a
pregnant woman expecting her first child while her hogtied husband played by
Serhiy Shadrin comes off as embittered, defeated and helplessly carrying on
actions undecided by himself. Oleg
Shcherbina as younger brother Yurik is a young but well-meaning hothead from
Kyiv trying desperately to yank his stubborn sister out of the Hell percolating
around her home. There’s also a small
amount of supporting cast members playing rebels and military personnel. The details of who is who on the sides of the
conflict don’t matter, only that wife Irka and husband Tolik are forced to roll
with the changes like it or not. That
the film stays focused primarily on three central characters also brings an
intimacy to the ongoing conflict, like you yourself could be one of these
ordinary civilians watching bombs fall nearby.
Currently only on streaming platforms (fingers crossed Kino
Lorber rights that wrong), Klondike became a critical success and
Sundance Festival favorite where it won the Best Director Award for World
Cinema Dramatic Competition. It also
went on to win the Ecumenical Jury Prize of the Berlin International Film
Festival and the Golden Tulip at the International Istanbul Film Festival. Simultaneously a war film, a character study,
a paean to maternalism and the will to survive in the face of certain death, Klondike
manages to be an apolitical ode to the endurance of motherhood and an
almost feral human instinct to keep on living in spite of social, economic or
political collapse. With the
Russo-Ukrainian war still going on, the Ukrainian film industry has responded
with refreshing, intensely personal and relatable tales of the human spirit in
the face of adversity.
--Andrew Kotwicki
