Rodnye (Close Relations)

Vitaly Mansky was born and raised in Ukraine. He went to Moscow to study and was just starting his filmmaking career when the Soviet Union collapsed. Suddenly Mansky was a Russian citizen, though most of his large family continued to live in Ukraine. Mansky's intimate and insightful new documentary finds him criss-crossing his homeland in the wake of the Maidan uprising, which left his relatives scattered on both sides of a caustic and dizzyingly complex political situation.

Beginning with Ukraine's 2014 federal election, Rodnye unfolds over the course of perhaps the most difficult year in the country's history since the end of the Second World War: a period of economic chaos, bloody conflict, and heated debate over the question of whether to integrate with Europe or maintain strong ties to Russia.

Mansky visits family in Lvov, Odessa, the Crimean peninsula, and the separatist Donbass region. He allows his relatives to speak freely about a national crisis that becomes only more dramatic and divisive with ex-president Viktor Yanukovych's flight to Russia. What emerges is a fractured family album, the assessment of a national identity crisis, and the chronicle of a year in the life of a country in tumultuous transition.

With his elegantly composed camerawork, Mansky is an ideal observer. He is both a native and a foreigner, easily generating trust with his subjects while also able to provoke them with difficult questions. Rodnye is an opportunity to examine a time of sweeping change through the eyes of someone uniquely poised to view it, both from within and without.

THOM POWERS