Stone Cross (film)

Night. A thief gets into the hut to the peasant. The master catches him. According to the laws of the peasant community, a thief should be judged in public, and a robbed master must kill him.

And in the night begins ... no, not yet a trial. A leisurely, thorough conversation with a thief about how he should be killed for this very theft. How to properly kill different people, depending on nationality and occupation. The participants in the conversation drink, drink the thief.

But by morning, Ivan Diduh, an old man exhausted by eternal rural work, ceases to understand why he should kill the same poor man as he himself.

The thief will be killed by villagers. And Diduh will cease to be his own for them.

The second half of the film Diduk says goodbye to the land, village, countrymen, home. He is leaving for Canada for a better share. Not only for him, but for the rest of the inhabitants, this departure is like death. And seeing off is a funeral. Even with his wife, he says goodbye, although she goes with him. And the land he plowed seemed to become the grave of Ivan. He personally drags her to the highest point, like Christ on Golgotha, and establishes a long-standing stone cross.

The whole village escorted them to the outskirts. And then the funeral service in the church. By full rank, like real dead.

• Daniil Ilchenko - Ivan Didukh
• Borislav Brondukov - a thief who climbed into the impoverished hut of an old peasant
• Ivan Mikolaychuk - Mikola
• Antonina Lefti
• Konstantin Stepankov - Mikhailo
• Vasily Simchich - George

• Script writer: Ivan Drach
• Director: Leonid Osyka
• Operator: Valery Kvas
• Artist: Nikolay Reznik
• Composer: V. Guba

• Award to the operator of the film (V. Kvas) VKF — 68 (Leningrad)

• "Stone Cross" on the site "Encyclopedia of Russian Cinema"