The White Bird Marked With Black
Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema
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1h 36m
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 patriarch, his three sons divided in their wartime allegiances. "The White Bird Marked with Black" is a masterclass in bravura camera movement, recalling Illienko’s work as DP on Sergei Parajanov’s "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors" (1965).
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 ... -
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...
