Haunted Ukraine Film Double - Ukrainian Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY is Yurii Illienko’s banned debut feature, a stark black-and-white parable about an old man, an abandoned village, a well, and a family that has drifted away from the land that formed them. Made shortly after Illienko shot SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS for Sergei Parajanov, the film shows him turning toward a quieter, more severe kind of Ukrainian poetic cinema.

The story follows Levko, an elderly man living alone in a nearly deserted village. His wife has died. His children have left. The well he tends once served a community, but now stands as a reminder of everything that has emptied out around him. Photographs, sand, wind, water and silence carry as much weight as dialogue.

The film was completed in 1965 but suppressed by Soviet authorities and left unreleased for more than twenty years. Its politics are buried in image rather than speech: rural abandonment, generational rupture, grief, memory, and the damage done to Ukrainian village life. Illienko creates a world where the past has not disappeared. It remains in the walls, the ground, the faces and the dry mouth of the well.

Opening Friday’s Haunted Ukraine program, A SPRING FOR THE THIRSTY gives the night its first ghost: not a monster, but a village emptied by history. It screens before SHADOWS OF FORGOTTEN ANCESTORS and MR. NOBODY AGAINST PUTIN.