Zvenyhora

A grandfather tells his grandson Tymish about a treasure he believes is buried in the Zvenyhora hills, a treasure he says belongs to the country itself. From there the film spreads across a thousand years: Scythians, Cossacks, the First World War, the revolution and the factories all chase each other inside the same narrative. Legend and history, folk tale and propaganda stand side by side, and it is not always clear which of them is speaking. This is Oleksandr Dovzhenko's first major film and the start of his Ukraine trilogy. The telling is not linear but associative, which made it hard to follow even at its first screenings. After watching it, Sergei Eisenstein said they had just witnessed a memorable moment in the development of cinema. The way the steppe, the trees and the faces are shot is the first form of the language Dovzhenko would build in the films that came next.