THE ENCHANTED FOREST

Svenigora is the name of the Ukrainian grass steppe between Kiev and the Zaporožian Setsch. With its graves and ancient stone statues, where the Zaporožian cossacks fought against Tatars and Poles, and where during the civil war the “Whites” fought the “Reds”, it is a mythical place to the Ukrainians. In his first long feature film, Oleksandr Dovženko, the masterful director of the poetic-avantgardistic Soviet cinema, links ancient legends of the enchanted treasure and a 1000-year-old immortal treasure hunter with the concrete civil war history of his time. The 1000-year-old grandfather has two sons: Pavlo, who rejects everything new and wants to find the treasure only for himself, and Timosh, the revolutionary soldier who strives for happiness for everybody. The film mixes epic, poetic, and authentic aspects and repeatedly blurs the boundaries between truth and phantasy, reality and surrealism.