Babylon XX (1979)

Original title

Вавилон ХХ

Directed by

Ivan Mykolaichuk

Genre

drama film

Country

Soviet Union

Runtime

1h 40m

Rating

3.6 of 10 from 8 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

Peasants in a 1920s Ukrainian village struggle to adjust to life in a new commune run by a Soviet sailor. The film shows the clashes and hardships that come with the forced shift from old ways to collective farming.

melancholicslow-burnearthysomberhistoricalpoeticfatalisticreflective

What happens

Babylon XX (Russian: «Вавилон XX», romanized: Vavilon XX; Ukrainian: «Вавілон XX», romanized: Vavilon XX) is a 1979 Ukrainian film of Dovzhenko Film Studios directed by Ivan Mykolaichuk in his directorial debut and starring an ensemble cast including Mykolaichuk, Lyubov Polishchuk, and Les Serdyuk as peasants struggling to adapt to life within a commune led by Soviet sailor Klym Synytsia (played by Ivan Havryliuk). It is a loose film adaptation of the 1971 novel A Flock of Swans by Vasyl Zemliak, and depicts collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and the transition from capitalism to communism in Ukraine. Babylon XX had a troubled production history, with both a part-time film crew and a backdrop of Soviet repressions on Ukrainian freedom of expression; Ukrainian poetic cinema, the movement to which Babylon XX belonged, was formally banned, and A Flock of Swans itself had been threatened to be banned. The film's production took two years before premiering at the 1979 Kyiv International Film Festival "Molodist" to critical acclaim, being awarded the festival's main prize. Since its release, the film has come to be seen as one of the greatest Ukrainian films of all time. It is tenth on the list of the 100 best films in the history of Ukrainian cinema created by the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre, and has been described as a classic of Ukrainian poetic cinema by the Ukrainian State Film Agency. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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