Poem of the Sea

Directed by Aleksandr Dovzhenko, Yuliva Solntseva
1959
95 mins

Larissa Shepitko went to the VGIK State Film School as a pupil of the Russian master Alexander Dovzhenko, director of classic films such as Earth and Arsenal. She also began her career as an assistant to Elena Solntseva, Dovzhenko's wife and together they completed his swansong, Poem of the Sea, the film on which he was working when he died. A fittingly elegiac tale of the collective mourning for a Ukranian village to be flooded for the construction of an artificial sea.