-
Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
8 items
Leaving March 1
Coined in 1970 by the Polish critic Janusz Gazda, the term “Ukrainian poetic cinema” was used to group the work of several burgeoning Ukrainian filmmakers who had shaken off the long-dominant mandates of “socialist realism”—as outlined by cultural commissars dictating terms from ...
-
2 itemsTwo by Hlynur Pálmason
2 items
Leaving March 1
Born in a fishing town in southeastern Iceland, Hlynur Pálmason trained as a visual artist before embarking on a film career. Accordingly, his work often bears a painterly quality, using the gelid tundras of his homeland as a backdrop to stage existential quarrels—between beauty ...
-
Buffalo Juggalos
Leaving March 1
Directed by Scott Cummings | 30 mins | 2014
Smeared in gaudy face-paint and dedicated as much to the hip-hop duo Insane Clown Posse as they are to generalized debauchery and destruction, the Juggalo remains one of fan culture’s most enduring—and most derided—outsider figures. In ... -
The Forest for the Trees
Leaving March 1
Directed by Maren Ade | 81 mins | 2003
Like her 2016 magnum opus "Toni Erdmann", Maren Ade’s devilish debut subjects its anti-heroine to a borderline sadistic ritual of ignominy. Melanie Pröschle (a fantastically game Eva Löbau), a 27-year-old schoolteacher moves to a new town, o... -
The Man With The Golden Arm
Leaving March 1
Directed by Otto Preminger | 119 mins | 1955
Incendiary at the time for its depiction of drug addiction, Otto Preminger’s noir-ish expedition through the caliginous slums and backdoor casinos of ’50s Chicago was so popular that it incited an investigation into cinema censorship—a... -
The Angels' Share
Leaving March 1
Directed by Ken Loach | 101 mins | 2012
Hewing closer to the spunky, good-hearted comedy of "The Full Monty" (1997) than one might expect from the director of "Kes" (1967), "The Angels’ Share" is a quaffable blend of Ken Loach’s trademark social critique and an offbeat crime cape... -
Winter Brothers
Leaving March 1
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 93 min | 2017
Winner of four awards at its Locarno premiere, Hlynur Pálmason’s debut feature introduces the traits that would come to define his future work (notably, the 2022 western "Godland")—fertile interrogations of masculinity and its entailing... -
A White, White Day
Leaving March 1
Directed by Hlynur Pálmason | 109 mins | 2019
Hlynur Pálmason’s second film opens with the Icelandic proverb that gives "A White, White Day" its title: “On such days when everything is white, and there is no longer any difference between the earth and the sky, then the dead can t... -
A Well for the Thirsty
Leaving March 1
Directed by Yuri Illienko | 73 mins | 1965
Though Yuri Illienko completed his feature debut in the same year as Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors—on which he’d served as cinematographer—"A Well for the Thirsty", one of Ukrainian cinema’s most formally audacious fi... -
Babylon XX
Leaving March 1
Directed by Ivan Mykolaichuk |100 mins | 1979
Having acted in several seminal Ukrainian films of the 1960s and ’70s, Ivan Mykolaichuk made his directorial debut with this work of fervid romanticism and rough-hewn beauty, set in the village of Babylon in the years after the revolu... -
Earth
Leaving March 1
Directed by Oleksandr Dovzhenko | 84 mins | 1930
For nearly a century, Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s final silent feature, which depicts a clash between reactionary landowning kulaks and modernizing muzhiks, has spawned debate: is it a propagandist paean to Stalin’s collectivization proj... -
Swan Lake. The Zone
Leaving March 1
Directed by Yuri Illienko | 96 mins | 1990
Released as the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union loomed, this adaptation of stories Sergei Parajanov wrote during his incarceration in the 1970s depicts the increasingly desperate attempts of a prisoner (Viktor Solovyov) to escape ... -
The Eve of Ivan Kupalo
Leaving March 1
Directed by Yuri Illienko | 71 mins | 1968
Loosely adapted from an 1830 short story by Nikolai Gogol, this is the symbol-rich tale of a farmer, Petro (Boris Khmelnitsky), who, prevented from wedding the lovely Pidorka (Larisa Kadochnikova) by her disapproving father, turns to a d... -
The Stone Cross
Leaving March 1
Directed by Leonid Osyka | 80 mins | 1968
Adapted from two short stories by the influential modernist writer Vasyl Stefanyk, Leonid Osyka’s best-known film—regarded as one of the supreme achievements of Ukrainian cinema—is set among the northeastern foothills of the Carpathians a... -
The White Bird Marked With Black
Leaving March 1
Directed by Yuri Illienko | 99 mins | 1971
Set during and immediately after World War II in a Hutsul village in Bukovyna—a region straddling the border between Ukraine and Romania and claimed by both—Illienko’s magnum opus follows a family of traveling folk musicians led by a wor...
