Sergei Loznitsa's feature film "Donbass", which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018 and was shown in German cinemas for a very short time a little later, is currently being shown in German art house cinemas.

There are two reasons for the resumption: distributors, cinema owners, even the online ticket service waive their respective share of the proceeds in order to make them available undiminished to aid projects, including a campaign by the German Film Academy, which wants to continue filming in Ukraine to enable the to document current events.

But the even more important reason for "Donbass" is: You see it in a new way, although it has remained the old film.

And you are ashamed.

In thirteen loosely connected episodes, Loznitsa tells the story of an uninterrupted spiral of violence that has taken place in the areas of eastern Ukraine that have been controlled by pro-Russian separatists since 2014.

When the militias in power there only ever use the word “fascist” to characterize their opponents in this film, one thinks they are hearing Vladimir Putin's voice on the screen.

When women, children and the elderly stray through spartan shelters, one believes oneself in recent news pictures.

When at the end the film team that was shown at the beginning and brought to safety is shown again and now murdered,

This film of the hour is four years old.

And you feel ashamed because you didn't understand at the time how deeply his fictional plot was rooted in political reality.

In the cinema there is a membrane of knowledge between the screen and the audience, and Loznitsa is one of those directors who tries to tear it apart.

He started out as a documentary filmmaker, best known in the field for Maidan (2014), but large cinema audiences are more comfortable with less intrusive fiction.

Loznitsa nevertheless tried to suggest objectivity in “Donbass” – which should not be confused with moral neutrality.

Rather, the film drastically takes sides against Russia, but does so with pseudo-documentary means: moving camera, casting of amateur actors at the shooting locations, shots from a distance,

Everything that now makes us shudder as authenticated by the war was already there in 2018 and close to reality, but it had no consequences for our view of Ukraine.

In an essay that Barbara Wurm, who is involved in the program selection of the Wiesbaden film festival "goEast", wrote for the current issue of the cinema magazine "epd film", she quotes Loznitsa with a resigned statement about the re-release of his film in Germany: "Maybe he explains something to someone.

But it's too late!"