In the Donbass, a region of Eastern Ukraine, a hybrid war takes place, involving an open armed conflict alongside killings and robberies on a mass scale perpetrated by separatist gangs.

In the Donbass, war is called peace, propaganda is uttered as truth and hatred is declared to be love. A journey through the Donbass unfolds as a chain of curious adventures, where the grotesque and drama are as intertwined as life and death. This is not a tale of one region, one country or one political system. It is about a world, lost in post-truth and fake identities. It is about each and every one of us.

Sergei Loznitsa was born in 1964 and grew up in Kiev, Ukraine. In 1987, he graduated in applied mathematics at the Ecole polytechnique in Kiev. He then worked as a researcher at the Kiev’s Institute of Cybernetics, specialised in artificial intelligence. In 1997, Sergei received his diploma at the Russian National Institute of Cinema, in Moscow, where he studied filmmaking.

Since then, he has directed 18 documentaries, winning prizes all over the world, and 3 feature films, all selected in competition at the Cannes Film Festival: MY JOY in 2010, IN THE FOG in 2012, A GENTLE CREATURE in 2017. DONBASS is his fourth feature, and was the opening film of Un Certain Regard at the 2018 Cannes Film Festival.