Radunitsa (film)

Ivan Koval, who lives in the city, comes to his native village to see his mother. His arrival coincides with the memorial day when the villagers gather at the cemetery ...

The film was shot on the story of Anatoly Kudravets "Radunitsa" (1970), the writer himself took part in writing the script for the film.

The story “Radunitsa” is the most famous and significant work of the writer ^[1] , even in the verses dedicated to the author by Bronislaw Sprintan he is listed as “who created“ Radunitsa ” ^[2] , the story is published many times, published in excerpts in newspapers ^{[3] [4]} , translated into foreign languages, including German and Bulgarian. The journal Voprosy Literatury called the story a milestone achievement of the “migration” direction of village prose - in the story “for the first time a hero appeared who was able to realize both his nostalgia and his spiritual connection with the village where he was born, where his relatives live, and in general the connections of the present and of the past ” ^[5] .

The character of the story is characteristic of a state when a man suddenly “sank roots”, pulled him to his native village, to the source. An electrical engineer lives in the city, is satisfied with both work and life, but he sometimes intends to continue to be in his native village, in the circle of close people, finding this an organic need. It seems to him, like the author himself, that it is possible and necessary to somehow combine, coordinate, combine all the good things that life gives in a modern city, with the manifestations of the simple and wise life of the people dear to the heart.

- literary critic Naum Perkin about the hero of the story "Radunitsa", 1975 ^[6]

The film is the debut of the famous cameraman Yuri Marukhin as a director:

And quite unexpectedly for the screen, the content of the new film "Radunitsa". The cameraman Yu. Marukhin, well-known in many films, did not accidentally make his feature film debut as a director on the story of the life of a village. He himself during the premiere at the House of Cinema said that he directed a film about memory. This motive pierces the film. But there are other attractive qualities in it: love for people living among fields and forests, comprehension of some kind of human solubility in nature, giving him new vitality.

- Neman magazine, 1985

The multi-colored sunken in the greenery of gardens and herbs shines the village where the heroes of "Radunitsa" live. The film is interesting, as it were, with a collective portrait of the village, the authors' attention to the big and small cares of people, their memory of those who did not return from the war. The filmmakers took us to the fields, the farmstead, the sawmill, the place of commemoration, in the hut, to tell how Ivan saw his countrymen and relatives after a long absence. It is logical to assume that this character should be, if not the main character, then at least interesting to us. Unfortunately, Ivan did not become them. Actor V. Bondarenko is constrained, somehow indifferent to his hero, the director also does not really favor him, turning his attention to his father, who died at a sawmill when Ivan was a little. The artist A. Livanov used the role assigned to him to show the former soldier as a man whose soul did not harden, and his character was as if woven from fogs and growth, smells of hay and grain. There is a lot in the picture - from the life served in episodes and fragments.

- Neman magazine, 1987 ^[7]

A performer of one of the main roles, Natalya Yegorova, in an interview with Sovetsky Screen magazine, noted that she was interested in playing: she played a young girl in Radunitsa, and at the same time, she was filming in a plane from studio to studio in Sverdlovsk in the film “ Girl from the city ”, where a mother of three children played, a woman wise in life ^[8] .

• Prize "Memory" at the XVIII All-Union Film Festival in Minsk ^[9] .

• Bondareva E. Debut - always an exam (Art. Film "Radunitsa") // " Soviet Belarus ", August 8, 1985