You're reading: The Guardian: Close Relations review – a family and a nation divided

Exploring how Russia’s involvement in Ukraine has affected his own family, Vitaly Mansky’s documentary shows the pain of loyalties tested.

Vitaly Mansky’s gloomy, sombre and garrulous film is a portrait of his extended family and of the divided nation of Ukraine: it makes an intriguing companion piece to Sergei Loznitsa’s Maidan, about the revolution of 2014. Close Relations is about relations growing further apart: the divided loyalties that have come painfully to the surface in Ukraine. It tracks the period from May 2014 – just after the anti-Russian EuroMaidan moment – to May 2015, when Ukraine finds itself in an eastern war with pro-Russian secessionist rebels, and also finds that Russia has annexed Crimea.

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