A son sets out across the entire country to reach his terminally ill father. The protagonist traverses not only a geographical distance of thousands of kilometres—from the north to the south of Ukraine—but a temporal one as well: in his memories, he travels back more than thirty years to his childhood in the early 1930s. This is the time of his father’s formation—a communist building a collective farm and a machine-tractor station, carrying out the dekulakization campaign, and fulfilling grain procurement quotas.

“White Clouds” stands out for its lyrical road movie format, unusual for Soviet cinema. The film combines footage from an actual journey undertaken by the director and cinematographer Mykhailo Bielikov to the screenwriter’s homeland in the Mykolaiv region, with staged dramatic episodes.

Both Oleksandr Syzonenko—in the autobiographical novel that forms the basis of the screenplay—and director Rolan Serhiienko in the film engage in a critical reckoning with the actions of their parents’ generation. As a result, the film was repeatedly criticized by censors who demanded changes. It is something of a miracle that this picture has reached us at all: it is one of the first works in Ukrainian cinema to address the theme of the Holodomor—artificial genocidal famine of the 1930s, and to portray the consequences of the war—which took an entire generation—not in a heroic register but in a tragic one. At the same time, the theme of male friendship and the relationship between father and son is rendered with remarkable tenderness and lyricism.