A Well for the Thirsty

Director: Yuri Illienko

1965 / 73min / 35mm

Illienko’s feature debut, completed the same year as Sergei Parajanov’s Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, on which Illienko had served as cinematographer and in which A Well for the Thirsty actress Larisa Kadochnikova also appears, would not be released until 1987, at which time audiences were able to see one of the most formally audacious films in the history of Ukrainian cinema, a work which depicts, almost entirely without dialogue, the daily and inner lives of an elderly widower (Dmitri Milyutenko) living in proximity to the Dnieper River. This almost absurdly simple “story”—if it can be called as much—becomes in Illienko’s hands something extraordinarily complex and, shot on special high-contrast stock and featuring a collage-like soundtrack by Leonid Hrabovsky, disarmingly strange and ravishingly beautiful.

35mm print from Yuri Illienko's personal collection

Q&A with composer Leonid Hrabovsky and Pylyp Illienko, Film Producer and son of Yuri Illienko on Saturday, November 15th