Direction: Natalya Vorozhbit
Country: Ukraine
Bad Roads consists of four disturbing episodes that take place in the dangerous roads and corners of the war-torn Donbass region in Eastern Ukraine. They barely connect, but the most attentive will find a thin, almost invisible thread bridging the stories. A tipsy school headmaster (Igor Koltovskyy) tries to cross a Russian checkpoint with no passport and a dummy Kalashnikov in the trunk; a worried grandmother (Yuliya Matrosova) tries to convince her teen granddaughter (Anna Zhurakovskaya) to return home as she keeps waiting for her missing soldier boyfriend outside at night; a captive journalist (Maryna Klimova) is taken by Russian soldiers to an abandoned spa to spend the night; and a young woman (Zoya Baranovskaya) pays a high price for having run over a hen while driving.
This bleak film unfolds with undiminished broodiness and an overall sadness that pierces. Humiliation is the world of order here in a desperate multi-layered odyssey where madness takes over sanity. First time director Natalya Vorozhbit turns her focus to the traumatic happenings, capturing the insanity of war with brutal clarity. The acting is strong and the images pretty capable, suitably obscured to bring about the right atmosphere.
And to think that the harshness found on these Ukrainian roads became unbearable today with this magnified, inglorious war in East Europe, is even more painful. The apprehension and heaviness in Bad Roads may put you off, but it won’t leave you indifferent.
