A teenager Sasha, whose parents divorced long ago, lives with his mother. Yevhenia Vasylivna loves him, cares for him attentively, and raises him with devotion. After the summer holidays, the young man returns from his father, with whom he has been on an archaeological expedition, with a firm intention to move to Novosibirsk to live with him. His mother finds out about his plans by chance and is beside herself. She conducts her own, not entirely ethical, investigation to understand what is drawing her son away, and tries in various ways to keep him. Sasha moves and speaks as if with effort, as though constantly pushing against a current or forcing his way through an overwhelming density of objects and meanings with which the director fills the frame—toward freedom.

Kira Muratova continues the theme begun in her previous film, “Brief Encounters”—that of different models of existence. The sedentary femininity is embodied by Zinaida Sharko. The father, with his romantically adventurous profession as an archaeologist, appears only in photographic slides—surrounded by his son and young female PhD-students.

But “The Long Farewell” focuses on a third figure: the adolescent who must decide whether to remain in the world of decorative plants, carved furniture, and lengthy drawing-room conversations, or finally to grow up and risk beginning a life of his own, to separate from his mother. Already in this early film, Muratova’s signature emerges: neurotic dialogue marked by repetition and, at times, an exalted language of gesture.

The film was completed in 1971 but did not reach screens until 1987, when it received prizes at the All-Union Film Festival and at the Locarno International Film Festival. The film led to the director being stripped of her VGIK diploma in a scandal, and to a lengthy ban on her filmmaking.

It ranks ninth in the Top 100 Best Ukrainian films according to the Dovzhenko Centre poll, and 59th among the greatest films directed by women in a survey by BBC Culture.