Field Work: films of the countryside
These films explore the provincial, the rural, the pastoral: whether idyllic retreat or bleak wasteland. They range from agricultural propaganda of the communist past to meditative documentary and contemporary climate crisis, demonstrating just how rich for cinematic exploration the human relationship to nature can be.
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Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by Sergei Parajanov • 1965 • USSR/Ukraine
The first mature masterpiece from one of world cinema’s true poets, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors bursts with imagination. Grounded in the folk traditions, aesthetics, and dialect of the Hutsul people of western Ukraine, Parajanov’s tale of for...
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Song of the Cornfields
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by István Szőts • 1948 • Hungary
A landmark film in Hungarian cinema history, István Szőts’s penultimate feature was banned for more than 30 years before being rehabilitated as a national treasure. Centring on a Hungarian soldier returning from the First World War who marries a woman he...
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The Bonfire
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Dmitry Davydov • 2016 • Russia/Sakha Republic
Set in the remote reaches of the Sakha Republic, The Bonfire is a modern-day parable of guilt and redemption. Dmitry Davydov’s breakthrough film centres on Ignat (Aleksei Ustinov), an elderly craftsman whose son causes the death of his co...
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Asya’s Happiness
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky • 1966 • USSR/Russia
Collective farmer Asya is in love with the father of her unborn child. However, he does not reciprocate, leaving her forced to choose between a loveless marriage to another suitor and single motherhood. Konchalovsky’s sparsely beautiful tale o...
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Merry-Go-Round
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Zoltán Fábri • 1956 • Hungary
Zoltán Fábri’s dizzying romance marked a turning point in post-war Hungarian cinema when it premiered at Cannes in 1956. Based on a novel by Imre Sarkadi, the film charts the travails of Mari (a star-making turn from Mari Törőcsik), a peasant girl betrot...
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Conscience
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Volodymyr Denysenko • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine
Volodymyr Denysenko’s searing partisan drama is a neglected masterpiece of Soviet Ukrainian cinema. Recounting a partisan attack on a Nazi officer and the brutal recriminations that follow, Vasyl Zemliak’s quasi-autobiographical script draws ...
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Spoor
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Agnieszka Holland • 2017 • Poland
Two of Poland’s cultural titans join forces as veteran auteur Agnieszka Holland adapts Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead into a propulsive eco-thriller. Agnieszka Mandat is magnetic as Duszejko, an animal ri...
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The Lord Eagle
Movie + 3 extras
Directed by Eduard Novikov • 2018 • Russia
Set in the 1930s, Eduard Novikov’s adaptation of Vasily Yakovlev’s short story follows an elderly couple deep in the Russian taiga. When they find themselves playing host to an unexpected guest one winter — a sacred eagle – they fear its arrival signals...
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Earth
Movie + 4 extras
Directed by Oleksandr Dovzhenko • 1930 • USSR/Ukraine
Widely regarded as Dovzhenko’s masterpiece and one of the finest silent films ever made, Earth is fiercely poetic and politically radical. Narrating the collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukrainian countryside, Dovzhenko employs avant-gar...
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Spring
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Arvo Kruusement • 1969 • USSR/Estonia
Widely considered their nation’s greatest ever film by Estonian audiences, Spring is a touching and invigorating period drama. Based on the popular novel of the same name by Oskar Luts, it tells the story of a group of rural schoolchildren at th...
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Autumn Sun
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Bagrat Oganesyan • 1977 • USSR / Armenia
Strikingly progressive and beautifully crafted, Bagrat Oganesyan’s Autumn Sun tells the story of Aghun (a bravado performance by the director’s own wife, Anahit Gukasyan), a simple woman forced to contend with the banal cruelties of the men wh...
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We Are Our Mountains
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Henrik Malyan • 1969 • USSR/Armenia
When a petty dispute over a lost sheep gets out of hand, a group of shepherds find their mountain idyll interrupted by the long arm of the law in Henrik Malyan’s cult Soviet satire, adapted from his own work by beloved Armenian author Hrant Matevos...
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Tulpan
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy • 2008 • Kazakhstan
Sergei Dvortsevoy’s Cannes-awarded fiction feature debut is part ethnography, part romantic comedy, and part beginners’ guide to sheep-rearing. Recently demobbed from the Russian Navy, idealistic young Asa returns to his family home on Kazakhstan...
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Dawn
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Laila Pakalniņa • 2015 • Latvia
At once an homage to and a subversive reimagining of Soviet cinematic heritage, Laila Pakalniņa’s Dawn is one of post-independence Latvia’s most crucial films. Pakalniņa draws on the Stalinist propaganda myth of Pavlik Morozov: an ardent Pioneer who wa...
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The Stone Cross
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Leonid Osyka • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine
Western Ukraine in the 1890s. When elderly peasant Ivan Didukh decides to leave his Carpathian home in search of a better life in Canada, the village comes together to ceremonially mark his departure, understood as symbolic of the death of their old...
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Happy-Go-Lucky
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Vasily Shukshin • 1972 • USSR/Russia
Vasily Shukshin delivers perhaps his most arresting film with this story of a Siberian tractor driver and his wife travelling to the Black Sea riviera for the first time. Along the way, our rural couple collide with various urban archetypes, inclu...
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Motorcycle Summer
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Uldis Brauns • 1975 • USSR/Latvia
When Māris receives a motorbike for his eighteenth birthday, he hits the road with his friends. When he meets unhappy bride-to-be Inese and her thoughtless fiancé, a whirlwind romance blooms that soon sees the pair riding the roads of Soviet Latvia. ...
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My Joy
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Sergei Loznitsa • 2010 • Russia/Ukraine
The first Ukrainian production ever to compete for the Palme d’Or, My Joy marked the fiction debut in one of the most vital directorial careers in modern film. Sergei Loznitsa’s grimly compelling excavation of the past and future of Russian nat...
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The Woman and the Glacier
Movie + 3 extras
Directed by Audrius Stonys • 2016 • Lithuania
Lithuanian glaciologist Ausra Revutaite has lived alone in the Tian Shen mountains of Kazakhstan for 30 years, with only a cat and a dog for company in her battered Soviet-era cabin. Her life is utterly dedicated to the study of the Tuyuksu Glacier. ...
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The White Bird Marked with Black
Movie + 2 extras
Directed by Yuri Ilyenko • 1971 • USSR/Ukraine
Yuri Ilyenko’s landmark film follows the Zvonars, a family of poor musicians, as personal and geopolitical crises collide across the course of the tumultuous 1940s. Set in the region of Bukovina, on the border between Ukraine and Romania, Ilyenko’s ...
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The Stone Cross
Directed by Leonid Osyka • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine
Western Ukraine in the 1890s. When elderly peasant Ivan Didukh decides to leave his Carpathian home in search of a better life in Canada, the village comes together to ceremonially mark his departure, understood as symbolic of the death of their old...
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The Ballad of Piargy
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Ivo Trajkov • 2022 • Slovakia
Ivo Trajkov’s exquisitely eerie blend of period drama and folk horror explores the dark depths of patriarchal cruelty and nationalist fervour. Told in a series of flashbacks, the film recounts the last days of the rural Slovak village of Piargy. The powe...
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Black Cat, White Cat
Movie + 1 extra
Directed by Emir Kusturica • 1998 • Serbia
A careening ensemble comedy bursting at the seams with music and visual energy, Black Cat, White Cat is Emir Kusturica’s madcap tribute to the marginalised and dispossessed. The film follows the twisted romances and small-time schemes of a community of ...