Jingle Hill? Knelling Mount? Ringing vault? The title of Dovzhenko’s film is as intriguing and hard to crack as the story it tells and the images it shows. If you are determined to follow the plotline, keep in mind that the story unfolds upon three planes at once: political, historical and mythological. One is a familial—and familiar—1918 Civil War allegory: a grandpa has two grandsons, one siding with the Reds, the other with those who fight for Ukraine becoming an independent state. Who will the grandpa support? A harder question than it might at first appear, for the grandpa is thousands of years old and has seen many friends and foes from many epochs of Ukraine’s long history. On the mythological plane, the grandpa has his own magic agenda: he knows that the woody hill Zvenigora is not a hill, but a vault full of Scythian treasures that he wants to unearth before the mystic monk who guards them. Go figure. It’s worth it.

Live Musical Accompaniment by Bertrand and Susan Laurence