TOP 4 Films About Ukrainian Cossacks

10 years ago, the Day of the Ukrainian Cossacks was established in Ukraine. The story of the Zaporizhzhian Sich and its glorious warriors is one of the main national treasures at the heart of Ukrainian statehood. In national heritage, Cossacks occupy no less a place than cowboys in American heritage. But, unlike cowboys, who became a national legend thanks to Hollywood, Ukrainian Cossacks are offensively underrepresented in films. We have selected four of the best films about Cossacks for you.

The Cossacks were a military class that emerged in the late 15th century, mostly formed from runaway serfs. Legendary warriors, mercenaries, and robbers, they were distinguished by their special style of dress, lifestyle, and code of honour. The Cossacks organised the Zaporizhzhian Sich, a military fortress in the lower reaches of the Dnipro River, on the territory of modern-day Zaporizhzhia. The Sich was a republic independent of neighbouring states with its own special laws and way of life. The Cossacks and the Sich became an important part of the mythology and culture of modern Ukraine.

‘The Lost Letter’ (1972)  

One of the key films of Ukrainian poetic cinema, which was a means of national resistance to imperial ideology during the Soviet era. ‘The Lost Letter’ is a free adaptation of the short story of the same name by Nikolai Gogol from the collection ‘Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka’. The story was thoroughly reworked by the film's screenwriter, the famous Ukrainian poet Ivan Drach, turning Gogol's gothic novel into a comedy buddy movie full of the anarchic spirit of the Zaporizhzhian Sich.

In the story, the Cossack Vasyl and his fellow Cossack Andriy have to deliver the Hetman's Charter to St Petersburg, which is being hunted by evil spirits. On the way, of course, they will have many dangerous and fun adventures in the picturesque Ukrainian countryside.

Director Borys Ivchenko, who lived only 49 years, directed one of the major box office hits of Soviet Ukraine in the sixties, the war drama ‘Annichka’. But ‘The Lost Letter’ was, in fact, an auteur film by the lead actor and co-director Ivan Mykolaichuk, one of the leading figures in the national poetic cinema of the seventies. Mykolaichuk had a hand in all the classic Ukrainian films of that period, from Serhiy Parajanov's famous ‘Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors’ to Yuriy Illienko's ‘White Bird with a Black Mark.’ Organic in any role, Mykolaichuk seems to have been born to play the Cossack Vasyl.

‘By Fire and Sword’ (1999)

The only Polish-produced film in our review, but with Ukrainian actors, is an epic adaptation of Henryk Sienkiewicz's historical novel ‘By Fire and Sword’. Jerzy Hoffman's four-part miniseries was once the most expensive Polish film project and a major cultural event in the humanitarian life of both countries.

‘By Fire and Sword’ completes Hoffman's trilogy based on Sienkiewicz's books and tells the story of the national liberation war of Ukrainian hetman Bohdan Khmelnytsky against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. 

Although Hoffman made the previous part of the trilogy, ‘The Flood’ (1974), in co-production with the USSR, a film about the emergence of Ukraine as a state could not be released in socialist Poland. In turn, Ukrainian audiences were also anxiously awaiting the film's release: in Senkiewicz's novel, neither Khmelnytsky nor the Cossacks are sympathetic. Instead, the Polish characters, in particular Khmelnytsky's opponent Jarema Wysniewiecki, are quite expectedly idealised.

However, Jerzy Hoffman, who is married to a Kyivan and has been closely associated with Ukraine for many years, smoothed out all the sharp political angles and showed that behind every historical character in the film there is his own truth. The result is an interesting historical epic with very vivid acting, which stands out from most historical costume films.

‘Mamai’ (2003)

This almost plotless but extremely beautiful film, shot by one of Ukraine's best cinematographers, Serhiy Mykhalchuk, is the author's version of the origin of one of the leading characters of Ukrainian epic, the Cossack Mamai.

Based on two Ukrainian and Crimean Tatar folk tales of the 15th and 16th centuries, ‘Mamai’ tells the love story of a Cossack who escaped from Tatar captivity and a beautiful Tatar woman.

There is no usual drama in ‘Mamai’, nor is there the romance of military adventures typical of films about the Cossacks. So it will be difficult and perhaps even boring for an unprepared viewer to watch this film. But if you are interested in European arthouse, then in ‘Mamai’ you will find a worthy example of late Ukrainian poetic cinema, which has become the quintessence of the style.

It's hard to believe, but ‘Mamai’ was actually the graduation thesis of director Oles Sanin and was made on a budget appropriate for a student film. Perhaps this is the secret of the artistic power of ‘Mamai’: the director created this film with no thought of distribution (although it was later shown all over the world). First of all, he was thinking about the visual language of his film, its imagery, which distinguishes ‘Mamai’ from Oles Sanin's subsequent works, which are much more traditional.

‘Maksym Osa: The Gold of Werewolf’ (2022)

‘Maksym Osa: The Gold of Werewolf’ is a mystical detective story set in the autumn of 1636. The Cossack Maksym Osa is forced to become a detective in order to clear himself of the charges of murdering five of his brothers and to find a stolen bag of gold, which the Polish king used to pay off the Cossack foreman.

This film was released for over a decade, having gone through the so-called production hell, when the entire film crew, headed by the director, changed several times, and the new team had to reshoot everything again. But even despite these efforts, ‘Maksym Osa’ was unlucky until the very end. The first Ukrainian film adaptation of a graphic novel was released six months after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when Ukrainians were, to put it mildly, not in the mood for cinema.

The Ukrainian graphic novel is a very exotic product on the Ukrainian book market. So it is no surprise that Igor Baranko's comic book, which was published in 2008 (first in Belgium in French and then translated into Ukrainian), has become a cult in the author's homeland. Fans of ‘Maksym Osa’ followed the vicissitudes of the film's creation very closely and were largely satisfied with the film adaptation.

Despite the obvious references to other films, you watch ‘Maksym Osa’ with interest and without the feeling of shame that viewers experience in a good half of Ukrainian films - what can you do, national cinema was still in the stage of formation and creative search before the Great War. Despite its gloomy, noirish atmosphere, ‘Maksym Osa’ is also quite suitable for viewing with the whole family.