Best Ukrainian movies (original) (raw)
by felixum8888 • Created 12 years ago • Modified 8 years ago
Best Ukrainian movies over years, from the silent era to nowadays. Interesting and underappreciated abroad films. You won't understand two third of the plots unless you are Ukrainian. But... whatever. And yeah, imdb, why don't you have all the films?
A timeless Carpathian story - the young Ivan falls in love with the daughter of his father's killer among the Hutsul people of Ukraine.
DirectorSergei ParajanovStarsIvan MikolaychukLarisa KadochnikovaTatyana Bestayeva
It's a pure masterpiece. The story about Romeo and Juliet from the Ukrainian Carpathians, where life and love are full of mysticism, ancient half pagan half Christian traditions. Visually perfect adaptation of Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky novel of the same name.
In the peaceful countryside, Vassily opposes the rich kulaks over the coming of collective farming.
DirectorAleksandr DovzhenkoStarsStepan ShkuratSemyon SvashenkoYuliya Solntseva
Back in the sixties Dovzhenko's silent masterpiece was in the top 10 films of all times. This film is all about symbolistic images and what later became the ABC of filmmaking
Colourful 'optimistic tragedy' of a poor family in Ukraine, living in the Carpathian mountains near the Romanian border, during the Second World War. Five sons of the family make up the village band, but as the battles between the Ukrainian nationalists and the Soviets go on, their band loses one player after another.
DirectorYuri IlyenkoStarsLarisa KadochnikovaIvan MikolaychukBogdan Stupka
That is the cult film for Ukrainians as it is about how policy and war disunite the family. Perfect directing, perfect acting. The director managed to put Ukrainian insurgent army partisan as one of the main characters.
This film tells what it was like to live in the USSR with brutal reality. A convict is forced to hide within a model of a hammer and sickle. Here a tragic romance ensues between the convict and woman worker.
DirectorYuri IlyenkoStarsViktor SolovyovLyudmila EfimenkoPylyp Illienko
"Swan Lake. The Zone". The film is like an obituary to the decaying Soviet Union. A man escape from the prison and hiding inside the Sickle and Hammer monument. A woman accidentally finds him. They fell in love but a man is wanted...
This film looks at the artificial famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine through the eyes of a single family. The famine, which killed millions of people, was the result of a Soviet policy intended to punish Ukrainians for opposing the collectivization of their farms.
DirectorOles YanchukStarsGalina SulimaGeorgiy MorozyukAleksey Gorbunov
"Famine-33". Gloomy, hard to watch but true film about one of the most horrible tragedies in Ukrainian history - organised by Soviet authorities famine that took away several millions lives in 1932-33. Based upon Vasyl Barka's novel "Yellow Prince"
How the miners of the Don coal basin (one of the industrial regions of Ukraine) were striving to fulfill in four years their part of the Five Year Plan.
DirectorDziga Vertov
"Enthusiasm. The DOnbass Symphony". The first sound documentary in the world by unsurpassed experimental director Dziga Vertov. Tells about Soviet industrialization in Ukrainian Donbas region. Conversed sequence of the communist star overthrown from the church dome is one of the must see scenes.
Piotr is a humble farm laborer living in a poor village. He wants to marry the beautiful Pidorka, but her father doesn't want to. Fortunately, the mischievous demon Bassaruv, who is at large in the country, offers him a deal.
DirectorYuri IlyenkoStarsBoris KhmelnitskiyLarisa KadochnikovaYefim Fridman
"Ivan Kupala's Day Eve". You won't get the plot, don't even try, unless you are aware of Ukrainian mythology. Director worked on cinematography for "Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors". Visually impressive and poetic story. Film was persona non grata in the USSR.
The Stone Cross (Kaminnyy khrest, 1968), based on two short stories ("The Stone Cross" and "The Thief," both published in 1900) by Galician novelist Vasyl Stefanyk.
DirectorLeonid OsykaStarsBorislav BrondukovDaniil IlchenkoYekaterina Mateyk
"The Stone Cross". This beautiful black and white film tells the story of Ukrainian peasant family in the beginning of the 20th century. The Didukh family is leaving for Canada forever. The grandpa asks to install a burial cross on the land as a reminder of them. Very good direction and cinematography. The "farewell to the homeland" dance scene is necessary to see.
A man travels around a city with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling invention.
DirectorDziga VertovStarsMikhail KaufmanElizaveta Svilova
It's Dziga Vertov, well, this film made history of the cinema. Why is it Ukrainian? It was shot mostly in Kyiv and Odessa by Vertov working in Ukraine at that time. And Dziga, his pseudo, is a Ukrainian word for a spinning top.
The old man who lives a secluded life in the desert, alone with only his memories and photographs.
DirectorYuri IlyenkoStarsDmitri MilyutenkoLarisa KadochnikovaFeodosiya Litvinenko
The allusive film about Ukrainian peasantry and how it was exterminated by the Soviets. Shot black and white.This movie was banned in the USSR for 22 year period.
A family of four lives in the suburbs household. Through a complex interplay of light and mirrors, it's more art installation than a house. The main character is a son in early thirties who almost does not appear on the screen. Suffering from asthma and struggling with dermatitis since his childhood, a man uses his condition to manipulate their parents and sister.
DirectorIhor PodolchakDean KarrStarsMykola VeresenLyubov TimoshevskayaYarovenko Ganna
Arthouse. Director's interpretation of 1656 painting "Las Meninas" by Diego Velasquez. Rotterdam film festival competitor.
1986. Chernobyl disaster. Couples, friends, and a risk-taking journalist are woven into the larger framework of the disaster. Panic follows.
DirectorMikhail BelikovStarsSergey ShakurovTatyana KochemasovaStanislav Stankevich
Realistic film "Disintegration" concerns Chornobyl disaster of 1986. Main character is a journalist who accidentally discovered that an explosion at the atomic station occured. As the issue was concealed by Soviet authorities he is unsure what to do: get away from the city with the family or do nothing. I bet it's the only motion picture that shows the situation around the disaster as it actually was.
One of the first non-state funded films of an independent Ukraine, this study of a Ukrainian soldier dealing with the traditional abuse handed out to new recruits in the Soviet army is based on the real-life experiences of director Andrii Donchyk and writer Yurii Andrukhovych.
DirectorAndriy DonchykStarsPyotr BenyukTaras DenisenkoAleksey Gorbunov
The title means "Oxygen starvation". Late "perestroyka". Soviet army was one the worst for human dignity places to be. The task of the army was to turn freethinkers into normal dumb Soviet people. An intelligent Ukrainian guy refuses to obey.
A Soviet musical-tragicomedy film by Dovzhenko Film Studios in Kyiv. The movie is considered a pearl of Soviet and Ukrainian cinema. The film is based on the novella by Nikolay Gogol.
DirectorBoris IvchenkoStarsIvan MikolaychukLidiya BelozyorovaFyodor Strigun
Cult Ukrainian surreal comedy "The Lost Letter", pure art. Based upon Nikolay Gogol's novela. About two Ukrainian peasant's dreaming they are Cossack ambassadors who has to carry the diplomatic letter to Russian tsaritza.
A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.
DirectorAleksandr DovzhenkoStarsSemyon SvashenkoGeorgi KhorkovAmvrosi Buchma
Early 1918. The independent Ukrainian People Republic is threatened by Russian bolsheviks troops coming to Kyiv while the Arsenal factory workers in the city uprise against Ukrainian authorities. Director Aleksandr Dovzhenko made the Soviet propaganda film about these workers killed by Ukrainian authorities and helped to install the ideological myth about "fallen bolshevik heroes"
Madcap comedy set in early 20th century Kyiv about a barber whose fondness for drink, gambling, and women lead to bankruptcy. He marries an ugly rich woman to solve his financial woes, but pines for a virtuous beauty who despises him.
DirectorViktor IvanovStarsOleg BorisovMargarita KrinitsynaNikolay Yakovchenko
"Race for two hares". Cult Ukrainian comedy about poor dandy from late 19th - early 20th century Kyiv who wants to marry two girls at once: one poor and beautiful as the other is rich but ugly.
A young piano tuner befriends two rich old-ladies, and plots, with the help of his girlfriend, to betray their trust and steal from them.
DirectorKira MuratovaStarsGeorgiy DelievAlla DemidovaRenata Litvinova
Everybody lies and fools - the main idea of this nice film by the cult arthouse director Kira Muratova.
A musical comedy about the adventures of four friends who are trying to film a yogurt commercials.
DirectorRoman BalayanStarsElena AminovaMikhail DerzhavinNikolay Grinko
"Romashkin's Effect". Roger Corman meets David Lynch in Soviet Ukraine - the most comprehensive description. Contains many wild surreal scenes. Tells about a typical Soviet citizen Romashkin with moustache who drinks milk and has bright fantasies. Stop! Fantasies? Fantasies are forbidden in the USSR!
In the St. Petersburg board for Alyosha life has begun new, without habitual parental attention. Being homesick, the boy has created in the imagination the fantastic world of underground inhabitants - with a secret, the king and citizens very similar to the people surrounding him. Without having managed to keep the secret of underground inhabitants in real life, Alyosha has lost them forever.
DirectorViktor GresStarsVitali SidletskyLarisa KadochnikovaAristarkh Livanov
"Black hen, or Underworld habitants". Visually strange and atmospherical film. Based on the children tale.
In Spring is a masterpiece of Ukrainian cinema avant-garde, a non-fiction film made by Mikhail Kaufman, Dziga Vertov's brother and co-author, along the lines of the avant-gardist theory of «cine-eye». The film shows Kyiv in 1929, almost unknown today. Pictures of wakening city, its resurging life resonate with lyrical views of reviving nature. Kaufman's attentive camera dwells deliberately on smiling faces of children, lyrically depicting a declaration of love to Kyiv. In In Spring, Kaufman used the method of «hidden camera» for the first time.
DirectorMikhail Kaufman
"In the Spring". Impressive silent documentary about spring in Kyiv. Directed by Mikhail Kaufman, Dziga Vertov's brother.
Jewish Luck revolves around Menakhem Mendl (one of Sholem Aleichem's characters), a daydreaming entrepreneur who specializes in doomed strike-it-rich schemes. Despite Jewish oppression in Tsarist Russia, Mendl continues to pursue his dreams and his continued persistence transforms him from schlemiel to hero.
DirectorAlexis GranowskyStarsSolomon MikhoelsS. EpsteinMoisei Goldblat
"Jewish happiness". The word expression "Jewish happiness" means someone's bitter misfortune. Though the movie is silent but one can laugh the hell out watching it. The plot is about two Jews from different Ukrainian towns who decide to make money from arranging Jewish marriages
The events of the movie take place in the city of Odessa. A guy named Sasha sees a beautiful girl on the street and, following her, inadvertently causes a car crash. The driver of the car turns out to be none other than this girl's father, who is also a screenplay writer currently experiencing a writer's block. Instead of demanding money from Sasha for repairs to his vehicle, the writer makes Sasha tell him all the details of his new relationship with the girl he saw on the street, not knowing that this girl (Lena) is his own daughter. To make things more complex, Lena has a younger sister Dasha who begins to like Sasha.
DirectorAleksandr PolynnikovStarsValentina TalyzinaAleksandr BuyanovOleg Fedulov
"The Seaside Boulevard". Very interesting musical romantic comedy shot in Odessa.