The Strayed / Pryputni

The market vendor Liudka and her 20-year-old daughter Svetka are traveling to the remote village of Pryputni to visit her mother. This short visit to Grandma Zina is an annual burdensome duty to tidy up the neglected cemetery. Driving them to the village is the eccentric taxi driver Yurko. In the village, a whirlwind of absurd encounters and equally absurd adventures awaits him and his equally eccentric passengers.

The events of this tragicomedy take place over the course of one day. The film The Strayed is based on Roman Horbyk’s contemporary play Center. Its main feature is the Surzhyk language spoken by all the characters, as well as the colorful personaes and the atmosphere of a Ukrainian village. All of this has been incorporated into the film itself.

A year before The Strayed, director Arkadii Nepytaliuk made the short film Blood Sausage, which was his first attempt to humorously depict the life of a modern village. The Strayed became a continuation of these rural sketches and his feature-length directorial debut. Nepytaliuk graduated from the Karpenko-Karyi Kyiv National University in the early ’90s. As an actor, he appeared in the short film Sashko by Mykola Kaptan, which represented Ukraine at the Berlin Film Festival in 1993. However, due to the lack of funding for the film productions and economic problems in the country, he had to wait more than twenty years for his chance. In a meantime he was working in television and teaching at the Karpenko-Karyi University.

Nepytaliuk filmed The Strayed at the age of 50. The film immediately became an event in Ukrainian cinema. Critics praised it for the unprecedentedly lively language of its characters, and audiences appreciated its straightforward comedic elements and good humor. The film ran in theaters for three weeks, earning 771,000 hryvnias during that period.