Rodnye - Close Relations

Russian citizen and Soviet-born Ukrainian native Vitaly Mansky crisscrosses Ukraine to explore the country’s society after the Maidan revolution as mirrored within his own large Ukrainian family. They live scattered all across the country: in Lviv, Odessa, the separatist area in Donbass, and Sevastopol on Crimea. The film is looking for reasons of the conflict after which citizens of a single country found themselves on different sides of the barricades. A division which Russia exploited to wage a war in Donbass, and camouflaged its aggression as an alleged civil war. The main narrative takes place in the here and now, starting with the turning point of ex-president Victor Yanukovych’s flight to Russia. But below the surface of everyday life there is a strong historical undercurrent, because the lives of protagonists of the film are marked by their Soviet past on every step they take. This undercurrent carries information about the Russian-Ukrainian conflict’s deep roots in centuries of close ties between the two countries.