Film screening Stormy Nights with live musical accompaniment

Stormy Nights with live musical accompaniment by Alla Zahaikevych and Yevhen Ulianov We are pleased to invite you to a cinematic performance: the screening of Stormy Nights, a masterpiece of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema, with live musical accompaniment by composer Alla Zahaikevych and percussionist Yevhen Ulianov. Created for propaganda purposes, Stormy Nights is an experimental live-action fiction film narrating the misadventures of a farmer who comes into contact with one of the key construction projects of the first five-year plan in the Soviet Union: Dniprohes. In Stormy Nights, its director Ivan Kavaleridze – an already famous sculptor who designed two constructivist monuments to Artem in Bakhmut and Sviatohirsk, a celebrated master of historical cinema and the director of the legendary Downpour (1929) and Perekop (1930) – created his first film that was based on contemporary material. Kavaleridze’s Stormy Nights, a masterpiece of Ukrainian avant-garde cinema, was banned by central Soviet authorities in 1931. The director was furiously criticized for so called formalistic errors and depicting the class struggle “in abstract and cosmic terms...”.