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 released until 1987. The daily deliberations of an elderly widower (Dmitri Milyutenko) become in Illienko’s hands something extraordinarily complex and, shot on special high-contrast stock and featuring a collage-like soundtrack by Leonid Hrabovsky, both strange and ravishing.