Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965) on Netflix
In a Hutsul village in the Carpathian Mountains, Ivan Paliychuk loves Marichka Gutenyuk, the daughter of his father's killer. Their families are enemies, and Ivan leaves to earn money.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.8/109,802 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes93%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ivan Paliychuk and Marichka Gutenyuk grow up in a Hutsul village in the Carpathian Mountains of nineteenth-century Ukraine, and have known each other since childhood. Their families share a bitter enmity: Marichka's father killed Ivan's father. The feud does not keep the two apart, and Ivan falls in love with Marichka. To prepare for a marriage, he goes away to work and earn the money a household needs. The Hutsul year in the village passes with its work and its holidays, its weddings and its funerals, and the changing seasons. While Ivan works away, Marichka remains in the village.
Cast
- Leonid Yengibarovas Myko
- Aleksandr Raydanovas Father of Marichka
- Igor Dzyuraas Ivan as a child
- Valentina Glinkoas Marichka as a child
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors (1965)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Parajanov first planned to cast Russian box-office magnet Genadi Yukhtin as the lead, Ivan, but after cinematographer Yuri Ilyenko and filmmaker Viktor Ivchenko said Yukhtin did not fit the part in Hutsul garments, he chose Ukrainian actor Ivan Mykolaichuk instead.
- Parajanov said the ministry asked him to make a Russian-dubbed version of the film, which was shot in Ukrainian and in the Hutsul dialect; in a 1988 interview with Ron Holloway he said he turned them down categorically.
- The film's gala premiere in Kyiv, at the Ukrayina movie theatre on 4 September 1965, drew a significant political protest over the Soviet regime's growing imprisonment and oppression of Ukrainian intellectuals.
- When the usual Venice Film Festival was not held in 1977, a Cultural Dissent program supporting repressed Soviet-bloc artists included a seminar for Parajanov, imprisoned on trumped-up charges of homosexuality, and screened two of his films, one of them Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors.
- The film's exact budget is not publicly known and survives only in records at the Ukrainian State Archives, where film historians found that UkrSSR cabinet ministers reproached Parajanov in May 1966 for exceeding the budget by 97,000 rubles.
- The village scenes were shot in the Carpathian village of Kryvorivnia, and the house there where the filming took place is now a museum.
- The band A Hawk and a Hacksaw released its sixth album, You Have Already Gone to the Other World, in 2013 as a brand new rescore of the film, after playing it live in 2012 on tours of the UK, Portugal, Italy and Switzerland and at US screenings of the film.
