Along with Dumka, this Parajanov short forms a diptych on Ukrainian culture. It is about the Ukrainian craftsmen who work in ceramics, painting, glass and ornaments. One by one, Kateryna Bilokur, Dmytro Holovko and other legends of folk art appear on the screen, with the narrator commenting on the peculiarities of their work and the different regions of Ukraine they represent. Zoloti ruky reveals a few facets of Parajanov. One is his huge love for pieces of folk art, which he collected all his life. Another is the passion for folk art as a link to history and with nature. Parajanov pinpoints this connection through editing, mixing art works with landscapes. Of course, the Carpathians receive particular attention. So, four years before Tini zabutykh predkiv the director discovered for himself the culture of the Hutsul people, inhabiting the Carpathian region. Admiring the crafts of Kosiv masters, Parajanov demonstrated their legendary painted tiles, which would feature in the leading film of his Ukrainian period.
However, the most striking and inspiring episode in the documentary is an unexpected insertion of animation, based on a Ukrainian fairytale. The protagonists in this story are ceramic figurines of famous folklore characters. Through simple visual means, this story draws the observer into the vortex of Parajanov’s incredible imagination.

Stanislav Bytiutskyi

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