"A Spring for the Thirsty looks just as avant-garde today as it must have in 1965....The images collide in a concrete whirlpool of light and shadow which is truly astounding." (Kelly Vance, Express)A master director of the new Soviet cinema, Yuri Ilyenko's first film as director (he was cinematographer for Shadows of Our Forgotten Ancestors) was a Ukrainian lyric in the tradition of Dovzhenko's silents, a wonder in every sense of the word. An old man awakens to his own feelings of love and loneliness amidst memories of war and family reunion. Talking animals, music created for children, anti-Christian satire work cheek by jowl with a brilliant array of pastoral photographic styles. Written by the poet Ivan Dratsch as a tragicomic character study, the film becomes Ilyenko's parable of memory, death, and rites of passage. Finally brought off the shelf in 1987, A Spring for the Thirsty cost the director/cinematographer 22 years of frustration and official censure. Almost all his films were banned.-Russell Merritt