Western Ukraine in the 1890s. When elderly peasant Ivan Didukh decides to leave his Carpathian home in search of a better life in Canada, the village comes together to ceremonially mark his departure, understood as symbolic of the death of their old way of life. But Ivan must first reckon with a thief caught in his home, and his community’s brutal ideas about justice and penitence. Leonid Osyka set himself apart from other luminaries of the Ukrainian “poetic cinema” movement like Sergei Parajanov and Yuri Ilyenko with this alternately austere and exuberant parable, shot in stunning monochrome by Valery Kvas. Osyka’s almost documentary-like vision of village life on the brink of change is unsentimental but celebratory.