After Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s death in 1956, Yuliya Solntseva adapted three of his personal scripts, culminating in The Enchanted Desna. “Dovzhenko grew up in a town situated on the banks of the Desna River. The movie is a quasi-autobiographical memory piece that brings together three periods—the modern day, the Second World War, and the time of the filmmaker’s prerevolutionary childhood in a farm village—with a boldly subjective freedom akin to that of such innovators as Alain Resnais. . . . Solntseva pairs [the protagonist Oleksandr’s] idyllic memories with pictorial rhapsody, filling the screen with a molten crimson sunrise, wavering light on a river’s surface which looks like animated Abstract Expressionism, mist drifting dreamily along the riverbanks, smoke billowing, and clouds swarming amid the twilit sky” (Richard Brody, New Yorker). For Jean-Luc Godard, it was the best film of 1965.

Please note: We are showing a digital scan of BAMPFA’s 35mm print.