Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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 Moscow—to instead follow in the footsteps of Oleksandr Dovzhenko and his lyrical masterwork "Earth" (1930). Taking a freewheeling, experimental approach, bending the contours of time and space, the filmmakers featured in this series produced a cinema that explored a people’s relationship to their land, being the fertile ground from which their material culture and folkloric traditions sprang. Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema is a celebration of these artists and their questing after the ineffable spirit of Ukraine, a force far more profound and resilient than the existential threat at its doorstep.
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The Eve of Ivan Kupalo
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 demon who promises... -
The White Bird Marked With Black
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 world-weary patriarc... -
A Well for the Thirsty
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 rele... -
The Stone Cross
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 at the end of the ... -
Babylon XX
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 revolution but before c... -
Swan Lake. The Zone
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 confineme... -
Earth
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 project, or, as certa...
