Earth
Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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1h 23m
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 certain Soviet censors suspected, an on-the-sly celebration of a folk culture threatened with impending erasure? What is certain is that "Earth", with its distinct synthesis of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov, is among the greatest films of the silent canon.
Up Next in Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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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 ... -
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...
