This year, Liffe pays tribute to two female directors who visualized a unique political and cultural environment, developing an image of their respective countries from the perspective of cinematic characters. If the films of the Ukrainian director Yuliya Solntseva are "voices from the past", depicting melancholic and visually stunning images of the Dnieper Ukraine, the works of Kelly Reichardt, who presented her new film The Mastermind in competition at Cannes this year, are set in the stark environment of the Pacific Northwest, which is diametrically opposed to the sun-drenched landscape of her native Florida, where she made her 1994 debut film, River of Grass. As though jinxed in her native country, Reichardt struggled for a full dozen years to make her next film, Old Joy; since then, she has set most of her features in the rainy, grey and sparsely populated regions of Oregon and Montana, which have made her name as synonymous with the region as, say, Faulkner’s is with Mississippi.

For Yuliya Solntseva, such deviations never existed; she worked with her husband Alexander Dovzhenko, a luminary of Soviet silent cinema, until his death in 1956, also starring in his Earth (1930), one of the most beautiful films about the Ukrainian land ever made. After that, during the dissolution of the Soviet Union, she adapted her late husband’s unfinished screenplays and written material, and completed “The Ukrainian trilogy” herself, films depicting the region along the Dnieper and Desna rivers. These virtuosic “intimate spectaculars” par excellence (in colour and 70mm) combine social aspects with the deep intimacy of the Ukrainian people. The features deal with WWII, the Nazi invasion of the Ukraine, liberation and the post-war reconstruction along with the region’s increasing industrialisation. Her debut film, Poem of the Sea (1958), documents the construction of a huge hydroelectric dam on the Dnieper during this era of industrialization, only to be destructed during the current Russian invasion. Yuliya Solntseva's films are poems about life along the river where – as the protagonist of The Enchanted Desna (1964) explains – “we were cold in winter, sun-scorched in summer, only to be killed by rising waters in spring and deep mud in autumn”.

Simon Popek
Film Programme Director