Sovist’

The brutality of the Nazi occupation intrudes on bucolic Ukrainian village life. A young "local hero" kills a German officer; the Nazis threaten to kill the entire village. Resistance has less to do with ideology than with conscience, shows Denysenko, who grew up in occupied Ukraine and was declared an enemy of the Soviet Union after the war due to "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism." Created under the guise of a student project, SOVIST' was nevertheless censored and did not premiere until 1990. A black and white study of existentialism, taciturn to the point of silence, suspended in Krzysztof Penderecki's costume of sound. (bw)