Moeder

In the Donetsk region of Ukraine, not far from the Russian border, a young miner hears a crash and steps outside to find a phone ringing in his front yard. When he answers that phone-call his life is changed forever.

With the war in Ukraine now past the one-thousand day mark it can be easy to forget that for some the war has been raging on for much longer than that. Back in 2014, when Vladimir Putin was busy annexing Crimea from its sovereign territory, he was also funding separatist movements in the Donbas region to cause chaos and alarm and to take as much land in the East as he could for Mother Russia. Caught in the crossfire of the fighting between the Russian backed separatists and the Ukrainian army was Flight MH17, a civilian passenger plane carrying mainly Dutch nationals. Flight MH17 was hit by surface to air missiles and was brought down over the surrounding area of Donetsk, just fifty kilometres from the border. First on the scene, and first to sweep the land for remnants of the victims, were miners from the small town of Rozsypne.

In his new short film, Moeder (Mother), writer/director Salomon Ligthelm uses this tragedy as the basis for his story. Vitaly Ivanov (Galust) is a local miner who has a wife (Beloshapka) at home and a baby on the way. When, one day, there is an almighty disturbance outside his house, he steps outside to see what’s going on. At first, we are kept from seeing just what truly surrounds Vitaly, and the focus is kept on the phone that has seemingly appeared from nowhere and has started ringing in the mud. On the other end of the line a Dutch woman asks anxiously for her son, but to no avail. She is a mother without any answers and Vitaly has no way of offering her what she needs.

As the story progresses, we see Vitaly retreat within himself as he tries to come to terms with what to do. He is silent around his workmates and can’t bring himself to share his grief with his wife. Even a journalist, who is willing to pay good money for their story, can’t get Vitaly to say more than a few words on the subject of what happened that day. But in secret, Vitaly has been putting together the very few basics that he can translate, in anticipation of the next phone-call which he knows will surely come.

At the same time, the miners are called on to do some work topside, which will reveal the true extent of the horrors committed. They are given long poles with white flags on them, with which to mark the sites where they have found something in the long grass. There is discontent about their being used for this task as they are not soldiers, but as the foreman says, “If not you, then who else?”

To say that Moeder is a bleak representation of the conflict which has marred the Donbas region for so long, would be a gross understatement. Director of photography, Farhad Ghaderi keeps things grey and muted throughout, with very little light getting in. The sky is low, the dialogue is sparse, and any feeling of connectivity or human kindness is kept strictly in the background. This casts a sombre feeling over the whole film, echoing only a small sliver of the immense grief and tragedy of the real-life circumstances which inspired it, but which nonetheless pulls the viewer deeply into Vitaly’s struggle. Luke Atencio’s score also keeps the mood low, with haunting strings being matched to helicopter rotors and distant explosions to express the depth of feeling which runs through Vitaly’s story.

All of this means that when the emotional release does come it hits fast and it hits hard. The long, slow shots from Ligthelm which have built up the story, along with the editing of past events and symbols throughout the narrative, create a tension so strong that when it breaks it feels like the bursting of a dam. We are deliberately left in the dark as to the entire scenario until the very end of the film, however, once everything is pieced together, and the symbols come home to roost, there is a clarity which is undeniably emotive. Galust’s understated performance, too, is a marked achievement throughout Moeder, with it matching the quiet, contemplative grief found in Cillian Murphy’s portrayal of a coalman in Small Things Like These (2024).

Moeder is a powerfully emotive short film which takes the time to tell its story properly. It brilliantly encapsulates the helpless feeling brought to so many in conflict and expresses in vividly dramatic pictures what cannot be said in words. For a film that is not a joyful twenty-minutes, it is nonetheless one which is likely to be visited again and again by those looking for some sense of comfort in difficult times.