Soul and Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema

Coined in 1970 by the Polish critic Janusz Gazda, the term “Ukrainian Poetic Cinema” was employed as an unifying label to group the work of several up-and-coming Ukrainian filmmakers who had shaken off the long-dominant mandates of “socialist realism”—as outlined by cultural commissars dictating terms from Moscow—in order to follow in the footsteps of Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s lyrical masterwork Earth (1930) and produce a cinema that explored a people’s relationship to their land as a site for subsistence and spiritual connection, the fertile ground from which its material culture and folkloric tradition sprang. The films in this series are no dry works of scholarly ethnography, but rather works that take a freewheeling, experimental approach, bending the contours of time and space in search of the elusive soul of a land and its living culture. Presented on 35mm prints imported from Ukraine and digital scans from the Dovzhenko Center, Soul & Soil: Ukrainian Poetic Cinema is a celebration of these artists and their questing after the ineffable spirit of Ukraine, a force far more profound and resilient than the existential threat at its doorstep.

Co-organized by Metrograph and Razom for Ukraine

35mm prints and key artwork from the films of Yuri Illienko courtesy of Pylyp Illienko and Straw Bells Media

DCPs and film stills courtesy of Dovzhenko Center