An exposé about the people of the Donbass.
In 2016, the French journalist Anne-Laure Bonnel released a documentary following the lives of the Ukrainians separatists of the Donbass Region.
Bonnel, a young director and mother of a French family, decided to accompany Alexandre, a father of Ukrainian origin, to the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine in a pro-Russian zone. Bonnel captures the terrible images of a deadly conflict and an unprecedented humanitarian disaster. Donbass is an immersive, gripping documentary film in a war-torn country.
Filming war is not only filming combat. When war is treated as a spectacle, we often tend to forget what surrounds it. Off-screen, entire populations struggle to live, or rather to survive. Donbass informs about the struggle. Through her documentary, Bonnel films the conflict in its universality and presents that which we are usually not shown.
This is not a political message for or against any side of the conflict. Viewers are strongly advised to listen to the testimonies from all sides before reaching any definitive judgment.