Original title: Sovist
Copyright:  the Ukrainian State Film Agency
Format: feature narrative, drama
Carrier: DVD
Color: striking black and white
Length: 80 min.
Original language: Ukrainian and some German
English subtitles: yes
Restored by the Oleksander Dovzhenko Studio in 1989. Restored by the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, 2011.

Film crew
Director: Volodymyr Denysenko
Script writer: Volodymyr Denysenko and Vasyl Zemliak
Director of photography: Oleksander Deriazhny
Directors: Oleksa Moroz, V'yacheslav Kryshtofovych, Oleksander Melnyk, Oleksander Kybalnyk
Cameraman: Mykola Shabayev
Music used: Krzysztof Pederecki, Jozsef Bakki, Myroslav Skoryk
Produced at the Kyiv Ivan Karpenko-Kary State Institute of the Theater Arts
Sound: Anatolii Chornoochenko
Editor: Tamara Bykova
Featuring inhabitants of the villages of Kopyliv and Motyzhyn, Marakiv District, Kyiv Province.
Produced by

Film cast:
Anatolii Sokolovsky, Viktor Maliarevych, Mykola Oliynyk, Mykola Gudz, Oleksander Didukh, Vasyl Bohosta, V'yacheslav Kryshtofovych, Volodymyr Denysenko, Dmytro Deyev, Sashko Denysenko, Nina Reus, Halyna Dolhozviaha, Valentyna Hryshokina, Halyna Nakhayevska, Liubov Luts, Tetiana Turyk

Synopsis
Two Ukrainian youths are stopped on a country road by Nazi officers.
A fight ensues and one youth kills a German. The Nazis announce that if the village does not find the killer and give it up, all its inhabitants will be executed, including old people and children. Would it not be a lesser evil to give up the youth and save the rest of the village? But the village, already endlessly brutalized by the Germans, seems to be following a voice of conscience that defies this logic.
The film is striking it its black-and-white imagery unfolding not so much against, as together with, the emotionally intense music by Pederecki, Bakki, and Skoryk. In its minimalist staccato narrative, this drama reaches an emotional peak worthy of a true masterpiece. Conscience is absolutely free of Soviet ideological clichés obligatory for the WWII genre. The trappings of communist ideology are nowhere to be seen in it. There are no heroic and selfless Soviet partisans, no Bolshevik commissars, no Manichean answers to the impossible dilemmas the Ukrainians faced under the Nazi occupation – they were declared "traitors to the motherland by Stalin," they were treated as sub-humans by the Nazi Germans. Ukrainian peasants are face to face with an enemy, who can now show sentiments for children, feel love for a woman or genuinely admire nature and then be a cold-blooded murderer, diligent, consistent, and meticulous as he kills the people whose only defense is a silent solidarity with one another.
Conscience was immediately banned by the Soviet censorship. It was first restored in 1989 by the Dovzhenko Studio and in 2011 by the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture. This masterpiece of the Ukrainian New Wave of the 1960s is still to be discovered and appreciated by the Ukrainian and world viewer alike.