The brutality of Nazi occupation shatters the bucolic idyll of Ukrainian village life. A young "local hero" shoots a German officer, fatally, and now the Nazis are threatening to kill the entire village. No other film demonstrates with greater clarity that resistance is more a matter of conscience than ideology – this is the legacy bequeathed by Denysenko, who grew up in occupied Ukraine and was declared an enemy of the Soviet Union following the war, due to "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism". Created under the guise of a student project, CONSCIENCE was nevertheless still censored following its completion, and would have to wait until the early 1990s to celebrate its premiere. An existentialist study in black-and-white, taciturn to the point of speechlessness, creating space for Krzysztof Penderecki's enveloping sounds.
The brutality of Nazi occupation shatters the bucolic idyll of Ukrainian village life. A young "local hero" shoots a German officer, fatally, and now the Nazis are threatening to kill the entire village. No other film demonstrates with greater clarity that resistance is more a matter of conscience than ideology – this is the legacy bequeathed by Denysenko, who grew up in occupied Ukraine and was declared an enemy of the Soviet Union following the war, due to "Ukrainian bourgeois nationalism". Created under the guise of a student project, CONSCIENCE was nevertheless still censored following its completion, and would have to wait until the early 1990s to celebrate its premiere. An existentialist study in black-and-white, taciturn to the point of speechlessness, creating space for Krzysztof Penderecki's enveloping sounds.
