[IMDB] I watched this film this week on Tubi, where it is available with commercials. It also is available on Amazon with commercials.Eternal Winter is a Hungarian film about female German emigres in Hungary who were sent by the Soviet Army beginning in the winter 1944 to Donetsk coke mines, 2000 kms to the east. They originally were told they would be sent to harvest maize, but instead they wound up in the Donbass area from 1944 to 1949, when they were returned to Hungary.
Viewing the film the director, Attila Szász, and the production designers Viktória Horváth and Zsolt Nánássy, set about setting the mood which was dark and desperate, as the female miners were worked like slaves, experiencing starvation and disease, dealing with their Red Army captors in their desperation. The mood that was set was ever present throughout until the very last moments of the film.
I have a semi personal connection to the people who were deported to and from Donbass, Back just before the fall of the Soviet Union I was exchanging mail with whom I later found out were teachers at a Jewish school in Kiev.
In that exchange a man who was deported from Donbass to Germany to work, got my address and mailed me. Looking back, the guy had to be someone from Ukrainian security services. I never asked though. We had another brief mail exchange in which he expressed his views which would have put him in good company with Lyndon LaRouche.
I came away from the exchange with the conclusion that his experience as a slave for Nazi Germany fried his brain. A tragedy to be sure, but considering the tenor of the times, it was good he could express his real political views freely.
Saying all the above to say this: the Soviets and now the Russians exported the costs they have for maintaining their dominance of the region. It would truly be good if a detached observer could conclude what they are saying about the region, that they are in earnest about how they have been treated by the Ukrainians.
But the truth is complicated. They have a right to speak their tongue, but then so do the Ukrainians. The Russian speakers in Ukraine have the right not to be attacked through military means, as they have suffered the last eight years. It has been a shit show since Lenin, and things haven't changed or improved since.
A writer of the following review was much harsher that I, saying:
One cannot deny that Eternal Winter is a moving journey, but Szász couldn’t get rid of certain stereotypes commonly associated with the genre. The film is unfussy but flat in tone, visually arresting but emotionally vacillating, ultimately dramatizing when confronting challenges and resolutions.The last section wastes most of the emotional gravity previously built, and when the tears begin to roll, it’s the indifference that settles. The predicaments are not in the script, co-written by Szász and Norbert Köbli, but in the approach.
I strongly recommend the film.