Metrograph

Mykolaichuk, who’d appeared as an actor in several seminal Ukrainian films of the 1960s and ’70s (Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Stone Cross) and co-written the screenplay for Yuri Illienko’s The White Bird Marked with Black, made his directorial debut with this period piece, loosely adapted from a 1971 novel by Vasyl Zemliak, set in the village of Babylon in the years after the revolution but before collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, the same turbulent period depicted in Dovzhenko’s Earth. Inspired by the naïve art paintings of the Croatian Ivan Generalić, Mykolaichuk’s film—in which he appears in the key role of village philosopher Fabian—was completed in spite of a government crackdown on Ukrainian poetic cinema. Today, this work of fervid romanticism and rough-hewn beauty, made in conditions of utmost adversity, has rightly been canonized as a national cultural treasure.

DCP courtesy of Dovzhenko Center