Parajanov’s only black-and-white film, Kvitka na kameni, is set in Donbas, the coal-mining region of eastern Ukraine. It combines two rather unrelated plots revolving around two different characters: the coal miner Hryhorii Hryva (Hryhorii Karpov), a reveller who calls himself “the beauty and prideof Donbas”, and a young woman from western Ukraine, Khrystyna Ravlyuk (Inna Burduchenko, she appears in the titles as Inna Kyryliuk), who is sent to Donbas to recruit new members for the Pentecostal sect. The successful re-education of these “backward elements”, as they were called in Soviet times, is played out in both plots.
The reason these two plots exist in seemingly parallel realities is the tragic death of lead actress Inna Burduchenko, the rising star of Ukrainian cinema, during the shooting of the film, originally directed by Anatoly Slisarenko. Slisarenko, an ambitious but mediocre director, ordered the actress to run into a burning barn several times until she was fatally burned. He was eventually sentenced to five years in prison, and Parajanov turned out to be the only director at the Dovzhenko studio who agreed to take over the disastrous film. Parajanov showed little interest in composing any semblance of continuity from the existing footage. Instead, he added a series of eccentric, self-contained scenes that only emphasised the film’s artificiality. The result was a monstrous cinematic Frankenstein.
For those who know production history of the film, watching it becomes a fascinating detecting game of distinguishing between the scenes left by Slisarenko (all those starring Burduchenko) and those added by Parajanov (all those starring Karpov), although this boundary is sometimes blurred, since Parajanov occasionally used a stand-in for the deceased star. Such a detective’s gaze reveals a latently surrealist film with queer sensibility that deconstructs the dull socialist-realist narrative in the process of its completion.

Olga Briukhovetska