The Enchanted Desna

Director: Yulia Solntseva

1964 / 80min / DCP

The third film made by Solntseva from a script by her late husband and creative collaborator, The Enchanted Desna—an intimate epic in the magic-realist vein filmed on 70mm Sovscope and boasting state-of-the-art stereophonic sound—draws on Dovzhenko’s memories of his childhood on the banks of the Desna River in Chernihiv Oblast, moving freely between pre-revolutionary bucolic idyll, the horrors of World War II, and contemporary-set scenes. Winner of a Special Jury Prize at the San Sebastián Film Festival, Jean-Luc Godard’s favorite film of 1965 and, per critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, “among the most ravishingly beautiful and poetic spectacles ever made.”

DCP courtesy of Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, scanned from a 35mm print in their collection.

Part of Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire