Director Salomon Ligthelm lands a gut punch with his short film Moeder. The title means “mother” in Dutch, and that’s the word that Vitaly Ivanov (Chris Galust) sees flashing up on the smashed screen of the phone he finds in his backyard in Donetsk, Ukraine, in July of 2014. The viewer learns at the end of the film that the phone fell from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 after the Russians blew it out of the sky with a surface-to-air missile. Beside the phone, Vitaly finds the body of a young man.
Vitaly is one of a group of miners who are pressed into service to search for aircraft and body parts in the primary debris field. They ask why the military is not doing this task. The men are instructed not to speak to the press about what they are doing and seeing. Some of them do anyway, which is how the world gets details about the attack. Vitaly is a compassionate man, and he uses a translation app to compose a statement that he reads in Dutch when the phone rings again.
“…the phone fell from Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 …”
Ligthelm builds tension with Vitaly, his wife, and the miners without saying exactly what we are seeing until the end. There are text cards appearing before the credits that explain how and when the crash happened and how the word got out. This is a dramatized telling of a true event. All of it happened, as shown, right down to people in Amsterdam who had phones answered in Ukrainian when calling to check on their family members. The film is dark and bleak, both narratively and visually. Galust portrays Vitaly with reserved, laconic desperation.
Now, of course, ten years on, the horrors that have visited Donetsk are multiplied and amplified many times over compared to the downing of MH17. With the vicious, unprovoked Russian invasion of Ukraine, MH17 seems like a footnote in history. Yet, 283 passengers and 15 crew were killed. Moeder brings it home and makes it personal.
"…brings it home and makes it personal"
