‘Klondike’ Review: Ukraine’s Oscar Submission From Director Maryna Er Gorbach

deadline.com:

A camera pans slowly around a modestly comfortable living room. Here is the kitchen corner, with its microwave, coffee machine and jars of newly preserved tomatoes.

Here are the inherited cabinets, one full of the best china, one full of books. And now, here is a wall that doesn’t exist any more.

Torn plaster and broken wood frames a vast portal to the rolling steppes. There is a single road across those grasslands. It leads to Russia.

Dateline July 17, 2014 in the Donbas region of Ukraine, where local separatists are working with the Russian army and assorted mercenaries to stage an insurrection.