'Bad Roads' a.k.a. 'Plokhiye Dorogi'

A trip into the Donbas? How does war transform us?

We're survivors. In a democratic country with low unemployment and access to health care, it's easy to have morals or pretend to be noble. Plummeted into poverty and the threat of extinction, we're more likely to do whatever it takes to live - avoidance, running or fighting.

'Bad Days' isn't about running away. This is about survival, and those seeking control in a situation that’s out of control.

It's appropriate that this is an anthology, four stories showing different angles to devolution in context of the Ukrainian civil war in the Donbas. The theme may be consistent but tension, or the lack thereof, isn't. Consequently, I recommend that each be watch individually, at different times over one day or one per day. As short films with different moods, they work stronger alone.

• Part 1: A school headmaster arrives at a checkpoint without his identity document. The frustration at not being able to move freely within one's own country reminds me of '200 Meters', an excellent Palestinian movie released last year. The personal and internal conflict here is meekness versus bravery.

• Part 2: Part 1 indirectly introduced the topic of sex during war. Or maybe it's more precise to state men versus women with the caveat that women are capable of making their own bad choices. Here, a young woman and her grandmother sit at a bullet riddled bus stop, the latter trying to persuade the teen orphan to come home with her instead of pursuing her infatuation with a soldier.

• Part 3: This is the most direct and will likely be the viewer's best segment. A soldier has captured a woman. He claims to enjoy inflicting pain, and enacts it upon her, but he pauses at the possibility of love which suggests he wasn't an animal before the war.

• Part 4: What would you do if you ran over a chicken? And what would you do if you were the chicken's owner? Are we always who we are, or does poverty devolve us? Although subtle, I found this segment profound.

Director Natalya Vorozhbit has made a decent debut as director, more often choosing nuance and ambiguity so that foreigners such as myself only see it as anti-war. The Donbas separatists would likely see it as an insult but war sucks for civilians no matter whose fighting, or what they’re fighting for.