The Eve of Ivan Kupalo
Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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1h 11m
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 to expedite their union—for a price. A key inspiration for Robert Eggers’s "Nosferatu", Yuri Illienko’s second feature is augmented, like "A Well for the Thirsty" (1965) before it, by Leonid Hrabovsky’s intricate, otherworldly soundscapes.
Up Next in Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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The White Bird Marked With Black
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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... -
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...
