Long ago, a Bukovynian peasant named Rusak left his homeland and moved to Canada with his young daughter Orysia. Most of his life passed there, and it was there that he buried his daughter. After her death, Rusak decides to visit his homeland and returns to his village together with his granddaughter Orysia. While Rusak himself tries to recover the past and rediscover lost connections, Orysia falls in love with a handsome local man. Through this acquaintance, she unexpectedly discovers her ancestral land and comes to an awareness of her national identity.

This is the second film directed by the legendary actor Ivan Mykolaichuk. Following “Babylon XX”, he once again turns to the painfully relevant questions of national consciousness of the time. Yet whereas “Babylon XX” was a direct continuation of poetic cinema—clearly influenced by the work of Sergei Paradjanov and Yurii Illienko—in “Such a Late, Such a Warm Autumn” he gradually moves away from that influence. Combining poetic and ethnographic motifs, the director gravitates more noticeably toward realism. While retaining the warmth and humor characteristic of poetic cinema, he approaches national themes not only through imagery but also with a degree of critical distance. This shift can also be explained by the pressure of Soviet censorship, which forced Mykolaichuk and his co-writer Vitalii Korotych to revise the script multiple times.

Ivan Mykolaichuk himself played one of the lead roles in the film—that of the village heartthrob Hryhir. The role of Orysia was played by the legendary actress Halyna Sulyma, who would go on to appear in a number of landmark works of Ukrainian cinema, including “The Last Bunker” (1991), “Famine-33” (1991), “Marrying Death” (1992), “Fuchzhou” (1993), and “The Seventh Route” (1997). The film’s cinematographer is Yurii Harmash, with whom Mykolaichuk had already worked on “Babylon XX”.

A new digital version of the film was made in 2023 through the scanning of a 35mm positive print by the Dovzhenko Centre Film Laboratory.

English subtitles are created and provided voluntarily by woodworm.