The romantic musical "Hutsulka Ksenya" was a salient part of the program of the Ukrainian Film Days in Toronto which was held August 30 – September 1, 2019 at the Carlton Cinema. The program showcased select Ukrainian films produced in 2018: “The Wild Fields” film directed by Yaroslav Lodygin, “Donbas” satiric drama directed by Sergey Loznitsa, “Volcano” comedy and drama directed by Roman Bondarchuk, “The Stolen Princess” animated film directed by Oleg Malamuzh and the award-winning musical “Hutsulka Ksenya” by Olena Demyanenko.
It is a gem of a film about the Ukrainian highlanders of the Carpathian Mountains - the Hutsuls - immersed in their unique milieu of ancient lore, legends, beliefs, mores, customs, music, songs, speech, humour, and drama, which is faced with the "outside" modern world and its cultural and mundane components.
The film clearly fits a genre that is known in literature as "magic realism" - where the tangible, physical world of contemporaneity constantly interchanges to finally blend with the world of myth and spirituality; where the basic spheres of human nature, the physical and the spiritual, coexist in a symbiotic whole.
The salient aspect of this film is that those two worlds that come to face each other are portrayed through a love story between Hutsulka Ksenya and a Ukrainian American young man Yaro, who comes to visit the land of his ancestors - "the old country". This underlying episode of the film addresses the perennial, innate connection and relationship between the diaspora of a nation and its ancestral homeland - the "call of blood".
To reflect on and fully appreciate the multiple levels that make up this skillfully directed film it definitely needs to be seen more than once.
