Snow Will Cover the Roads… / Zasyple snih dorohy…

One winter evening a silver-haired  man, while puffing on his pipe by the fireplace, recalls the most touching moments of his life. Memories of a carefree childhood, a youth marked by war, sorrowful losses and victorious celebrations, love, and warm family walks appear and disappear in his mind like traces in the snow. His only company is his faithful dog, one of the heroes in his memories. The lyrical “film of nostalgia” or “film of recollection,” as the author calls it, reflects on how human memory works.

The author conveys a sense of warmth and intimacy not only through the content but also through the film’s creation technique. He achieves various shades of white using salt and roasted semolina, while black is provided by coal. The avant-garde minimalist style of the cartoon continues the traditions of Eastern European animation and the author’s decades-long experiments. Created during the rise of computer feature animation, the cartoon appears as an elegant, handcrafted work where the craftsman’s hand and vision are evident.

The music for this film, as with most of the director’s works, was composed by the renowned Vadym Khrapachov. The cartoon had a successful festival career, winning the main prize in the Best Animated Film category at the Clermont-Ferrand Festival. Yevhen Syvokin is a pillar of Ukrainian animation for several decades, a student of one of the founders of Ukrainian animation, Ipolyt Lazarchuk, who became a teacher for most of our contemporary animators.