Roman Balayan’s graduation film, shot while studying at the Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University of Theatre, Cinema and Television and based on Marko Cheremshyna’s novella “The Thief Was Caught.”

Driven by hunger and thirst, a village boy commits what seems like an innocent act: he drinks milk straight from a neighbor’s cow. But a local wealthy family sees the boy’s action as a crime and decides to teach the insolent child a lesson.

The film’s stunning images of lush nature sharply contrast with scenes of animal-like cruelty, making the work at once a daring student film and a tribute to the avant-garde traditions of Oleksandr Dovzhenko. This stylistic approach was highly praised within Kyiv’s poetic cinema school, which the young director deeply admired at the time—though he would soon abandon it entirely in favor of “urban cinematic prose.” The film and its director also had a patron in Sergei Paradjanov himself:

“Paradjanov took my graduation film all across the Soviet Union because it completely imitated his poetic cinema. It’s called «Thief», based on Marko Cheremshyna. At first I submitted nineteen short screenplay ideas for my diploma, and not a single one was approved. So I thought maybe they would at least accept a classic—and by chance I came across Cheremshyna. It was a story about an orphan boy who suckled milk from someone else’s cow; they caught him and beat him. Later, the Party organizer at the institute declared during a meeting that the film was «a slander of the Ukrainian ethnos.»”
— from the director’s interview for Amnesia