Mykola Vinhranovsky Month
This is the name of the famous Ukrainian film director and actor’s film retrospective, now showing in Kyiv’s Megaplex Cinema
The Shore of Hope (1967) was on show on April 10, the film was first to be directed by Vinhranovsky alone. It is set on a Pacific island where the hydrogen bomb tests are conducted. The radiation sickness kills a group of local fishermen. Having received a large dose of radiation, the bomb’s inventor, American scientist Thomas Sherwood, comes to profess the theory calling for “atoning of one’s sins through personal suffering.” However, the approaching death makes him rethink his worldview. The film starred Vinhranovsky himself, Yurii Leonidov, Borys Bobikov, Volodymyr Zeldin, Ausma Kantane, and Opanas Kochetkov.
April 17 will see a screening of the director’s landmark work Klymko (1983) which was awarded the Shevchenko Prize. Vinhranovsky wrote the script for it, too, based on Hryhir Tiutiunnyk’s novelette of the same name. The film features the dramatic fate of a country boy whose father left home to fight in the World War II. The boy suffers from hunger, injury, and loneliness in his Nazi-occupied home village, but maintains his composure. After the village’s liberation, the boy goes to a trade school... The film starred Serhii Kretov, Nadia Butyrtseva, Pavlo Ptashynsky, Oleksii Dobrolezha, Volodymyr Stankevych, Yurii Katin-Yartsev, Anatolii Barchuk, and others.
The Tale of Flaming Years (1961), to be screened on April 24, was the first Soviet wide-screen live-action movie, and young Vinhranovsky’s lead role in it brought him recognition throughout the Soviet Union. Scripted by Oleksandr Dovzhenko and directed by his wife Yulia Solntseva, it was awarded prizes at international film festivals in Cannes, London and Los Angeles. The movie’s protagonist, the villager Ivan Orliuk joins the army when the German-Soviet war erupts. With a submachine gun in hand, he walks a long way from the Dnipro’s banks to Berlin. When the victorious soldier returns home, he faces the postwar difficulties. The film starred the director himself, Borys Andreiev, Serhii Lukianov, Vasyl Merkuriev, Svitlana Zhhun, Mykhailo Maiorov, Zinaida Kyriienko, and others.
The retrospective will end on April 30 with The Quiet Riverbanks (1972). The movie may be seen as the culmination of Vinhranovsky’s work in the 1960s and 1970s. Its plot revolves around the murder of a fisheries inspector. The film starred Yurii Mazhuha, Natalia Naum, Viktoria Smolenska, Borys Shcherbakov, Oleksandr Plotnykov, Mykola Sektymenko, Fedir Panasenko, and others. After its release, Vinhranovsky went on a 10-year-long hiatus as a director!
The event’s organizers told The Day that besides free screenings, they planned to hold photo and video projects, as well as a competition for schoolchildren.
