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 Spring 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
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... -
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...
