Kvitka na kameni

Parajanov’s only black-and-white film is set in Donbas, the coal-mining region of eastern Ukraine. It combines two rather unrelated plots revolving around two different characters: the coal miner Hryhorii Hryva, a reveler who calls himself “the beauty and pride of Donbas,” and a young woman from western Ukraine recruiting new members for a Pentecostal sect.

The reason these two plots exist in seemingly parallel realities is the tragic death of lead actress Inna Burduchenko, the rising star of Ukrainian cinema, during the shooting of the film, originally directed by Anatoly Slisarenko. Slisarenko ordered the actress to run into a burning barn several times until she was fatally burned. He was eventually sentenced to five years in prison and Parajanov took over the film, showing little interest in composing any semblance of continuity from the existing footage. Instead, he added a series of eccentric, self-contained scenes that only emphasized the film’s artificiality.

Watching the film thus becomes a fascinating detective game that reveals a latently surrealist film with a queer sensibility that deconstructs the dull socialist-realist narrative. (Olha Briukhovetska)

Olena Honcharuk is the general director of the Dovzhenko Centre – Ukrainian National Film Archive in Kyiv, and head of the Dovzhenko Centre Film Museum. She holds a master’s degree in cultural studies. Over the past 11 years, she has worked for two major institutions in Ukraine which care for cultural heritage and national identity: the National Art Museum of Ukraine and the Dovzhenko Centre. She has spent eight years working at the National Film Archive, working her way up from project manager to director, with active involvement in the process of institution formation and Ukrainian cinema studies.