Earth 1930

The film opens with a wind-swept field of wheat and sunflowers, setting a quiet, rural mood before the story shifts to a life-marking moment. An old peasant named Semyon dies beneath an apple tree, attended by his son Opanas [Stepan Shkurat] and grandson Vasyl [Semen Svashenko], anchoring the tale in family ties and generations watching the land change.

Elsewhere, the local kulaks, led by Arkhyp Bilokin [Ivan Franko], denounce collectivization and vow to resist its reach. At Opanas’s home, Vasyl and his friends gather to debate the future of agriculture, clashing with Opanas, who remains deeply skeptical of the mass farming program.

Soon Vasyl arrives with the community’s first tractor, a beacon of progress that stirs excitement among the villagers. A charged moment unfolds as the men, under the heat of the radiator, react with a crude rite that ends up as a reckless plow through the land and the destruction of the kulaks’ fences. A continuous montage follows, tracing the lifecycle of bread from the fields to the table, underscoring the transformation that the village undergoes under collectivization.

That night, Vasyl returns along a quiet path, dancing a hopak as he nears home, only to be struck down by a dark figure. When his death is discovered, Opanas searches for the killer and confronts Khoma [Petro Masokha], Bilokin’s son, who refuses to confess to the murder.

Vasyl’s father rejects the local priest’s plan to lead the funeral, expressing atheism and asking Vasyl’s friends for a secular farewell and to “sing new songs for a new life.” The villagers honor the request as Natalya [Yelena Maksimova], Vasyl’s fiancée, mourns beside them, while the priest curses the mourners from the shadows.

At the cemetery, Khoma arrives in a frenzy to declare that he killed Vasyl and to resist collectivization. The crowd largely ignores him, though one of Vasyl’s friends offers a moving eulogy that memorializes the fallen man.

The film closes with a montage of rain pouring over fruit and vegetables, a visual echo of the village’s hardship and renewal. In the aftermath, Natalya finds herself embraced by a new lover, signaling a complicated, unsettled future shaped by loss and the ongoing social upheaval.