"The Distant Barking of Dogs": a boy and his grandmother deal with civil war in eastern Ukraine in 2014

PBS POV presented an abridged (91 min to 53 min) version of “The Distant Barking of Dogs”, directed and written by Simon Lereng Wilmont, on Monday, August 5, 2019. The PBS link is here. 

  

In late 2014, as winter falls into the eastern Ukraine, civil war rages between the Ukraine and Russian separatist forces probably supported by Putin.  The area is called Donbass and the village is Hnutove.

A ten year old boy, Oleg, living in a rural shack with his grandmother Alexandra, deal with the shellings in the distance. The script says that Oleg often vomits during the shellings.

At school, the teacher says that the kids must learn to live in a war zone where things can hurt them, and that they must learn to protect themselves and their families.  This is made to sound almost like the conscription of children into adult ethnic conflicts.

This is a Sundance project film, from Final Cut for Real.

  

The presentation was followed by a very brief director interview statement.

Wikipedia attribution: 

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