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Year of production : 2018

Director(s) : Igor MINAIEV
Producer(s) : Iurii LEUTA (Trempel Films)

A plane is flying in a thick fog. We can see land among torn clouds. Smoke from plants spreads over this dead black land. This is Donbas, one of the major coal mining regions of the Russian Empire, then the USSR, then Ukraine and since 2014 – no man’s land.
In fact, we heard a lot about Donbas without paying much attention to it. The film starts with the most famous documentary film of 1930, the classics of the Soviet cinema and propaganda, ‘The Symphony of Donbas’ by Dziga Vertov. Propaganda typical for the Soviet ideology is obvious. It can’t have been different: cinema occupies the first place in distorting reality which serves to create the myth about the new world.
‘The Cacophony of Donbas’ shows how new reality is formed with the help of distorting history. By exploring the chronicle of Donbas from 30s to 90s the film exposes the mechanism of consciousness manipulations.
The myth of Donbas is one of the foundational in the system of the Soviet mythology in which miners were elevated to the level of heroes. However, in 2014 the myth began to tumble down. The Symphony of Donbass turned into the Cacophony of Donbas.
The symphony of Donbas started with cheerful sounds of the march of machines and turned into the cacophony of Donbas with its whizz of bullets and bomb explosions.