Synopsis

He lived a season under bombings, was captured by rebel fighters and survived to tell his story.

The story of Carlos Gonzalez Sháněl, war correspondent, is fascinating and heartbreaking at the same time. His reports were broadcasted by television stations in Europe and Latin America, and were followed by hundreds of thousands of people during his coverage of the war in Ukraine.

His comments, sometimes full of anguish and interrupted by explosions, not only reconstruct the life and death on the battlefront, but lead the viewer to feel the depths of human pain. The “Ceasefire Zone” documentary reproduces the voices of the protagonists, shows the faces of the victims and proves the fragility of peace agreements signed during the war in Ukraine.

Ceasefire Zone is not only about the war in Ukraine.

It started with the revolution of the Euromaidan; the European movement that culminated in the ouster of former pro- Russian president Viktor Yanukovich. On the night of November 21, 2013 tens of thousands of people staged angry protests in the emblematic Independence Square in Kiev. One hundred protesters were killed by the dreaded Berkut militia.

While in Kiev the Euromaidan was being harshly repressed, on the other end of the country, in the Russian-speaking Donbass region, protesters also took to the streets. But instead of chanting “Glory to Ukraine”, they carried Russian flags and banners to protest against the new government installed in Kiev.

From there, events moved with incredible speed. Russia annexed Crimea, pro-Russian rebels declared themselves the creation of the Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and a few weeks after a bitter war between the Ukrainian army and pro-Russian separatist militias broke out. A war that, a few years ago nobody would have imagined at the gates of Europe and that plunged Ukraine into its worst crisis since its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.

Ceasefire Zone is the result of hundreds of hours of images, sounds and testimonies collected during the trips of Carlos Gonzalez Sháněl and his team to Ukraine. In them, the journalist can observe how the treaties that demanded the warring forces to agree a ceasefire quickly became a pantomime of peace. In the Donbass, fierce combats were still underway.