A Well for the Thirsty
Leaving Soon
•
1h 11m
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 films, was not released until 1987. The daily deliberations of an elderly widower (Dmitri Milyutenko) become in Illienko’s hands something extraordinarily complex and, shot on special high-contrast stock and featuring a collage-like soundtrack by Leonid Hrabovsky, both strange and ravishing.
Up Next in Leaving Soon
-
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 ...
