“Donbas,” a feature film about Russia’s war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas, has won multiple awards at the Zolota Dzyga Ukrainian Film Academy Awards, the Ukrainian equivalent of the American Oscars, on April 19.
The film received awards for the best picture, screenplay and directing. The Ukrainian Film Academy handed each award to Sergei Loznitsa, recognizing the achievements of the Ukrainian director who was born in Belarus.
“This prize is special because the film is set in Ukraine,” Loznitsa told the Kyiv Post after receiving the final award of the evening on April 19. “But it’s not about the region. It’s about the monsters in people’s subconsciousness. I tried to catch them, define them and corner them back to where they belong – in fiction, fairy tales, hell.”
“Donbas” consists of 13 vignettes about the grotesque and macabre reality of the Russian-occupied territories of eastern Ukraine. The stories are based on real life videos shot in the region that Loznitsa found on the internet.
The film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2018 winning the Un Certain Regard prize for best directing. Over 20,000 people watched it in Ukrainian theaters after the October release. It will premiere on Ukrainian television on May 9, a national holiday in Ukraine that celebrates the victory over the Nazi regime during World War II.
Another film set in the Donbas region “The Wild Fields” won five awards at the film festival, the most by prize count this year. The social comedy-drama adaptation of Serhiy Zhadan’s novel “Voroshylovgrad” won the awards for best actor and supporting actor, best cinematography, sound and production design.
“We had the best team. And while it’s easy to find the best cinematographer, sound director and production designer because there are not that many in Ukraine, I am happy to have picked debut actor Oleh Moskalenko out of 150 contenders,” the film’s director Yaroslav Lodygin told the Kyiv Post.
Second by prize count is “Brama” (meaning “Gate” in Ukrainian), a mystical comedy-drama about a broken family in the Chornobyl exclusion zone headed by matriarch Grandma Prisa. The film is based on a theater play and won four awards for best original music, makeup, supporting actress and actress. The lead role was performed by Irma Vitovska.
“It was challenging because I had to play only with my eyes,” says Vitovska, whose Grandma Prisa makeup took four hours to apply. “But I’m thankful for the chance to play a character symbolizing Ukrainian history and embodying the experience and pain of generations.”
The prize for the best documentary feature went to “Myth,” a biography of Ukrainian opera singer Vasyl Slipak who worked in France for 19 years. In 2014, he volunteered to fight against Russia’s invasion in eastern Ukraine but was killed by a sniper in 2016.
The honorary prize for the contribution to the development of Ukrainian cinema was awarded to Yuriy Garmash, a 72-year-old cinematographer best known for his work in “Babylon XX” (1979) and “Izgoy” (1991).
Altogether, there were 20 awards given out at Zolota Dzyga this year. Two of them are new – the best song and best editing awards. It is the third year in a row that the festival has taken place. The award is named after Ukrainian director Dziga Vertov, who helmed the classic documentary “Man With a Movie Camera.” The name of the festival can also be translated as “Golden Spinning Top.”
Zolota Dzyga nominations and winners are determined by the Ukrainian Film Academy that currently has 355 film professionals, 35 percent of which are women. The Academy was created in February 2017.
