Original title: Rika
Copyright: The National Oleksander Dovzhenko Studio, Ministry of Culture of Ukraine, 2008.
Format: feature short
Carrier: DVD
Color: color
Length: 20 min.
Original language: non-verbal
English subtitles: n/a

Film crew
Director: Tamara Karpinska
Script writer: Tamara Karpinska
Cinematographer: Dmytro Havrylov
Artistic designer: Oleksander Sheremet
Composer: Hanna Havryliuk
Sound: V’iacheslav Shtefan
Ukrainian folk song “Yahundky” is performed by the DakhaBrakha.
Shot on location in the village of Sosnytsia, Chernihiv province.

Film cast
Kateryna Kachan, Dmytro Havrylov

Synopsis
From the director’s own synopsis, “It is a story of two people so deeply in love with each other that even death cannot tear them apart. The events take place in Ukraine during WW2, but a story like this could happen anywhere to anyone: war and love, encounters and expectations, happiness and misfortune, birth and death – everything disappears in the River of Time.”
This beautifully photographed non-verbal and yet very expressive film was shot in the Ukrainian countryside north of Kyiv, in the area around the village of Sosnytsia where Oleksander Dovzhenko grew up.
Says Tamara Karpinska, “I wrote the screen play many years ago after a conversation with my grandmother. I listened to her stories about war, famine, old times, about her love. On my way back home I was thinking that most probably now we are making things much too complicated and everything must be simple. Within just one day I quickly wrote down a story of two people in love. Nothing much happened, they quite simply met, fell in love with each other, and could have happily lived till they would have been one hundred, if the war had not separated them. At that time it did not occur to me that the story would end up being a film. I felt as if I had seen someone else’s dream.”

About the director: Tamara Karpinska was born in 1969 in Ukraine, she graduated from the Nizhniy Novgorod Drama School in Russia (1994) and acted at the Kamerny Theatre, Marionette Theatre, Silver Island Theatre, Actor Studio Theatre, Benefit Performance Theatre in Kyiv. She is also an actress, singer, screenwriter, and photographer. Her script «The River» was awarded as the best script at the Open Night Film Festival (2004, Ukraine). In 2008 she graduated from the Karpenko-Kary University of Theatre, Film and Television in Kyiv as a feature film director. Short feature film «The River» is her directorial debut.