In the Carpathian Mountains of 19th-century Ukraine, love, hate, life and death among the Hutsul people are as they’ve been since time began. Ivan is drawn to Marichka, the beautiful young daughter of the man who killed his father. But fate tragically decrees that the two lovers will remain apart.
Folk comedy that tells the adventures of Ukrainian cossacks Vasyl and Andriy as they set out on a long journey to deliver a letter from their leader to the Russian empress in St. Petersburg.
This film is based on the classic novel of the same name by writer Ivan Franko, one of the most famous figures of Ukrainian literature. It is set during the 1200s and the invasion of the medieval Ukrainian-Russian state of Rus' by Chengis Khan's Golden Horde. Due to its having been produced during the Soviet era, the story's aspect of class-conflict between the "heroic" peasantry and the "decadent" noble particularly emphasized here.
