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 ...

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...

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 ...

Directed by Borys Ivchenko • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine

A wartime melodrama shot through with the folkloric magic and vivid imagination that defined Ukraine’s so-called “poetic cinema” of the 1960s. In the dark days of Nazi occupation, a young girl native to the Carpathian mountains falls in love with ...

Directed by Borys Ivchenko • 1972 • USSR/Ukraine

Borys Ivchenko’s fittingly surreal adaptation of an 1832 short story by Mykola Hohol, otherwise known as Nikolai Gogol, stars the irrepressible Ivan Mykolaichuk as a Zaporizhian Cossack and is full to bursting with the author’s trademark devils, c...

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...

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...