Leonid Osyka’s VGIK student short Entering the Sea is considered the very first film of the Ukrainian new wave of the 1960s. However, his most famous film was his next work, The Stone Cross, where he replaced the mellow sea background with the harsh landscapes of Ciscarpathia, the northeast Carpathian Mountains. After a long life of poverty in a small Ukrainian village, Vasyl Didukh decides to emigrate to Canada, but a thief’s actions create a new conflict. Like the majority of Ukrainian poetic cinema at that time, the film was an adaptation, this time of two short realistic and ethnographic stories by Vasyl Stefanyk.