Bukovyna, Ukrainian Land

Alexander Dovzhenko and Yulia Solntseva, 1939, a short documentary made to bless the Soviet annexation of Northern Bukovina from Romania. The land is Ukrainian, the film says, and then shows you why: orchards, embroidered shirts, faces, a harvest that looks like a painting. The politics are the occasion. The eye is Dovzhenko's — the same landscape intelligence as Earth, now in the service of a border. Solntseva, his wife and later the keeper of his unfinished work, shares the credit. Watch it as propaganda and as a last look at a region before the next war redrew it again.