Women’s War Beyond the Violated Body: Maryna Er Gorbach’s Klondike and Feminist Cinematic Method

This article analyzes Maryna Er Gorbach’s film Klondike (2022), an impressive piece of Ukrainian art-house cinema that centers women’s experience of Russia’s ongoing war of aggression in Ukraine. By departing from what Walt Whitman termed the ‘red business’ of war (Whitman, W., 1982. Complete poetry and selected prose. New York: Library of America, p. 417), the film foregrounds the everyday, embodied experience of its heroine, producing a distinctive form of cinematic realism and emotional intensity. The article argues that Er Gorbach reconfigures normative femininity as both a site of constraint and agency, thereby challenging dominant conventions of war cinema. Drawing on feminist film theory and transnational cinema studies, the article situates Klondike within broader discourse on marginalized communities and non-Western knowledge production.