July 17, 2014. Irka (Oksana Cherkashyna) and Tolik (Sergey Shadrin) live humbly in the Ukraine border town of the Donetsk, an Eastern region of disputed territory during the dawn of the Russian-Ukraine Donbas war in Klondike. They’re expecting a child. The film opens as the couple discuss birthing plans and getting somewhere safe to deliver the baby in voice over. Jolting viewers out of even one moment of calm, an explosion rips through the house, leveling a wall of their abode clean off. Commercial airline MH17 has just been shot down right in their front yard.

What follows is a nightmarish cinema verité vision of ruined domesticity as a harrowing border conflict breaks out. As Tolik placates the separatist who expect him to join their efforts, his family’s options for escape fade. Their village has been seized and no one is allowed to leave. Under promises of leniency, Tolik is forced to slaughter his wife’s treasure cow and offer up the meat to faceless soldiers. Meanwhile, Irka stumbles through the halls of her ruined house in a state of desperate shock.

Tolik, the extremely pregnant Irka, and her suspecting loyalist brother do the only thing they know how: try to pick the pieces up. They hastily collect scattered bricks and thatch them back into a pathetic makeshift wall. But it’s not enough to obscure the Russian invasion pressing in on their backyard.

Writer-director Maryna Er Gorbac complicates sparse scenes of domestic hopelessness with disconcerting action just out of focus in the backdrop. Striking unfocused tableaus show dozens of soldiers scouring a field by flashlight or capture cranes picking up and disposing of the pieces of the shot-down airplane. Evidence of collateral damage haunts every frame of Klondike and we’re left to sit with Irka’s human-level tension. Tasked with bringing new life into the fold of a humanitarian crisis, motherhood has never seemed so objectively ill-informed and yet, life presses on.

Vehemently bleak, Klondike challenges the viewers’ perspective of this still very active crisis that’s been unfolding in the Ukraine since 2014. As of writing this, Russian troops line the borders of Ukraine, promising an all-out invasion won’t be in the cards. That their dispute will be settled peacefully. The events of Klondike speak otherwise.

Gorbac creates a ground-level portrait of despair and hopelessness and shoves us into the eye of a crisis where the walls close in inch by inch until the lack of options is absolutely suffocating. Every time a pair of head lights approach Irka’s demolished home, tensions rise. No single entity can be trusted here. Gorbac’s techniques are understated, hauntingly minimalism. The mundanity of becoming an overnight refugee is reflected in the grey and straw-toned color pallete. A visual nod to the drab, ashen despair that has overtaken the lives of his characters.

At one point, Gorbac’s wandering camera stumbles upon a row of bodies in black plastic wrap lying in lines atop fields of withered sunflowers. Relics from a brighter time. We don’t know if these sunflowers will ever bloom again but Irka must carry on nonetheless. Cherkashyna gives a raw whole-body performance in the role, coming to terms with the burden of carrying her child to term in a war zone. As Klondike wrestles with what is it to bring new life to such horrifying circumstances, Irka does not have such luxury. Her baby is coming. One way or another.

CONCLUSION: ‘Klondike’ sees being stranded in war-torn Ukraine through the domestic lens of one couple. Maryna Er Gorbac’s harrowing vision of hopelessness and despair is punctuated by the quiet resistance of maintaining the will to survive.