Ukrainian poetic cinema
The folkloric, image-drunk films that came out of Kyiv's Dovzhenko Studio in the 1960s and early 1970s, against the rules of socialist realism.
Sergei Parajanov's Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) is generally credited as the starting point. Its folklore, poetry, song and dance rejected socialist realism, and Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (1930) is often named as a precursor.
Yuri Illienko, who shot Shadows, and Leonid Osyka followed as directors, with Osyka's The Stone Cross (1968) among the movement's central films. The actor Ivan Mykolaichuk and the writer Ivan Drach were part of it too. The films were often at odds with the authorities.
Films to start with
In the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.