KLONDIKE

UKRAINE

Director: Maryna Er Gorbach

Cast: Oxana Cherkashyna, Sergiy Shadrin, Oleg Scherbina

Genre: War Drama

100 minutes – Ukrainian, Russian, Chechen with English subtitles – 2022

July 2014. Expectant parents Irka and Tolik live in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine near the Russian border.  Tolik’s separatist friends expect him to join their efforts, while Irka’s brother is enraged by suspicions that the couple has betrayed Ukraine.  Irka refuses to be evacuated even as the village gets captured by armed forces, and she tries to make peace between her husband and brother by asking them to repair their bombed house. Meanwhile their nervous anticipation of their first child’s birth is violently disrupted by the nearby crash of flight MH1. The incoming parade of mourners emphasizes the surreal trauma of the moment.

Klondike has already won 13 awards this year, including World Cinema Directing Award at Sundance, and the Ecumenical Panorama Prize at the Berlin Film Festival.

An exhilarating piece of cinema, meticulously framed, exquisitely blocked, and beautifully performed, this is a film about the choices we make as the world is torn apart.

Andrew Haigh, Sundance Film Festival 2022

Klondike stands as one of the stronger dramatizations of this crucial moment in recent history.

David Katz

Director/screenwriter/editor Maryna Er Gorbach’s Ukrainian-set drama couldn’t be more timely as it exposes the absurdity of war and the travails of parents-to-be living near the Russian border.

Randy Myers, San Jose Mercury News

Gorbach presents war as an insidious and dangerous beast, prowling about the edges of people’s lives, swiping at those who aren’t directly involved just as easily as those who are.

Amber Wilkinson, Eye for Film