Volcano

Lukas is an interpreter working on an OSCE military inspection tour. Through a string of odd coincidences he is left stranded in southern Ukraine, on the steppe near a small town. He has nowhere to go. A local man called Vova takes him into his house and the young city man finds himself inside a world he knows nothing about. Roman Bondarchuk's film is about a province where rules, order and time work differently. The telling neither mocks that world nor romanticises it; Lukas's contempt slowly comes apart. The closeness that grows with Vova's daughter Marushka is the story's second line. It was made in 2018, before the present stage of the war, and is worth more now for having recorded that region. The steppe landscape is a character in itself.