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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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...
