Swan Lake. The Zone
Leaving Soon
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1h 36m
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 his own confinement. Filmed in the very prison where Parajanov—who, at the time of production, was dying of cancer—had been held, Yuri Illienko’s bracingly tactile work is both a tender goodbye to his onetime collaborator and a wary welcome to an uncertain future.
Up Next in Leaving Soon
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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...
