Dennis Harvey Film CriticCanadian filmmaker and photographer Louie Palu’s “Zero Position” offers a stark snapshot of war’s devastation in Eastern Ukraine.
Shot in 2016, well before the current invasion but at a point when Russia-allied separatists had already occupied much of the Donbas region, this impressionistic documentary does not provide much in the way of contextualizing explanation, let alone political analysis.
But it has considerable potency as a record of the ruination such armed conflicts leave behind, reducing once-bustling population centers to eerily quiet (yet still perilous) wreckage.The director’s opening voiceover provides the largest dose of straight intel as he notes having journeyed there two years after the separatists declared independence from Ukraine, “to understand what the war looked like.” What he found was “a place of competing ideologies, a cultural borderland between East and West, at war over a past and future identity.” But no one among the combatants and civilians here (few of whom are identified) discusses such issues, beyond making general pleas for peace and stressing their humanity as more than simply an “enemy.” Nor are there interviews per se; Palu prefers to let those he meets act as tour guides, showing us destroyed homes and schools.
A guard protects transformers targeted by rebel forces whose snipers may lay just out of sight. We get a fairly lengthy visit to a still-functioning coal mining operation, this region’s key industry — and doubtless a major cause of its value to Russia.
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