The Stone Cross
Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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1h 19m
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 19th century. Ivan (Daniil Ilchenko), a peasant, is poised to make a new start in Canada when a thief breaks into his house. He must decide this transgressor’s fate before a council of his unforgiving neighbors.
Up Next in Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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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...
