As vladimir putin encircled her country with tanks in February, Alina Pash took to the stage in Kyiv as part of a televised competition. The singer hoped to represent her country at the Eurovision Song Contest in May; she said her song would “show the world that Ukrainian culture is beautiful” and enduring:

“Trembitas are crying for my free people
Who for centuries lived through the storm”

Ms Pash’s music blends genres, often folk—a trembita is a horn played by the people of the Carpathian mountains in western Ukraine, where she is from—pop and hip-hop. She is just the sort of post-Soviet, westward-looking Ukrainian that Mr Putin despises. She was selected as Ukraine’s Eurovision entry but later withdrew having violated competition rules by visiting Crimea in 2015. (Under Ukrainian law it is also illegal to travel to Crimea via Russia.)

“What this story has come to is not at all what I tried to convey with my song,” the musician posted on Instagram. She had hoped to allude to a source of national pride: her track, “Tini Zabutykh Predkiv”, shares its name with the country’s greatest film, made at a time when, as now, Ukraine’s very culture was under threat.

In 1911 Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky wrote “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”, a short novel set among the Hutsul people of the Carpathian mountains. Set in the late 18th century the book tells of Ivan, a young shepherd, and his love for Marichka, the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy. After Marichka drowns, Ivan mourns and has hallucinations of his beloved. Later he enters a loveless marriage with the unfortunate Palagna, who betrays him with the local molfar (witch doctor). Ivan and Palagna make each other miserable until he too is killed. In 1963 the Dovzhenko Film Studio in Kyiv began work on an adaptation of the book, directed by Sergei Parajanov, to commemorate the centenary of Kotsiubynsky’s birth.

Parajanov was born in 1924 to a middle-class Armenian family in Georgia; he studied film in Russia before moving to Ukraine. In the Soviet Union each republic was allowed its own film industry but all films were funded by, and required the approval of, the state. Parajanvo’s early works, including “The Top Guy”, a musical set on a kolkhoz (collective farm), were distinctly Soviet. But “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” abandoned socialist realism in favour of a distinct style that became known as “poetic”.

Filmed on location in the mountains, experimental camera techniques made “Shadows” one of the most innovative films of the 1960s. An opening scene is shot from the perspective of a falling tree. A wedding procession is filmed in a dazzling blur through the undergrowth. Sets and costumes are rich with detail. The soundtrack sets Ukrainian folk songs to the call of trembitas, the twang of drymbas (a small metal instrument held in the mouth and vibrated with one finger), flutes, choirs, funeral incantations and church bells. A chorus of old peasant women and children comments on events.

Although “Shadows” was a Ukrainian film, its cast and crew included Armenians, Ossetians and Georgians. The film’s star was Ivan Mykolaichuk, an ethnic Hutsul, insisted on by the studio to bring “authenticity” to the production. That Parajanov had wanted a better-known Russian actor for Ivan’s part sits awkwardly with the reputation he later developed as a defender of Ukrainian culture. In 1988 he said: “The film was not only shot in the Ukrainian language, but it was also in the Hutsul dialect. They asked me to dub the film in Russian but I turned them down categorically.” Parajanov’s decision had backing from the studio and the film became, according to James Steffen, the author of a book about Parajanov’s work, “one of the first (and very few) non-Russian Soviet films to be released Union-wide in its original language”.

It was a daring thing to do. “To hear Ukrainian spoken was an affirmation,” says Vitaly Chernetsky, a professor of Slavic and Eurasian language and literature at the University of Kansas. Although it was not an overtly political film, it became one. At the film’s premiere, Ukrainian dissident-nationalists protested against the persecution of Ukranian intellectuals. Despite this controversy “Shadows” was delivered by the proud Soviet authorities to film festivals across the West, where it won more than 20 prizes (although without its director, who was blacklisted and refused permission to travel abroad). It became, writes Joshua First, an associate professor of history at the University of Mississippi, “the first film that Western critics would identify as ‘Ukrainian’ rather than generally ‘Soviet’ or ‘Russian.’”

Parajanov was working during a window of relative freedom after the death in 1953 of Joseph Stalin. His other masterpiece, “The Colour of Pomegranates” was released in Armenia in 1969. But Soviet authorities were much less receptive to this poetic biography of Sayat-Nova, an 18th-century Georgian-Armenian poet, and the film was heavily censored before a limited release in the rest of the Soviet Union the following year. By 1972 the cultural “thaw” had ended in Ukraine and the crackdown began. Along with many other experimental films, “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors” was banned. In 1973 Parajanov was arrested on trumped-up charges of sodomy and rape. Andrei Tarkovsky, Federico Fellini and John Updike, fellow film-makers and writers, were among dozens of artists who appealed for his release. That was granted in 1977, but he was arrested again in 1982, this time on bribery charges. He made two more films before his death in 1990. His supporters announced that “the world of cinema has lost a magician”.

Ukrainians regard “Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors”' as a defining part of their history. It is both a reminder of the creativity that can flourish under repression and an emotional link to their homeland. For Mr Chernetsky this sense of place is particularly poignant now, “as Ukrainians are defending their country against Russian aggression they also have this feeling of oneness for the place where they are from”. ■