Synopsis
Set between the two World Wars and based on true historical events, Bitter Harvest conveys the untold story of the Holodomor, the genocidal famine engineered by the tyrant Joseph Stalin. The film displays a powerful tale of love, honour, rebellion and survival at a time when Ukraine was forced to adjust to the horrifying territorial ambitions of the burgeoning Soviet Union.
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Cast
- Max IronsYuri
- Samantha BarksNatalka
- Terence StampIvan
- Barry PepperYaroslav
- Tamer HassanSergei
- Aneurin BarnardMykola
- Tom AustenTaras
- Richard BrakeMedved
- William BeckStefan
- Lucy BrownOlena
Recommendations
- 50
Slant Magazine
The film is an awkward mix of swashbuckling love story and polemic, painted in very broad strokes. - 50
Movie Nation
Bitter Harvest never amounts to more than a colorful misfire, a picture with much of the pageant of the period, but little of the roiling passions that dominate politics in the Breadbasket of Europe, even today. - 50
Boston Globe
As the film darkens, it intensifies its focus on tragedy and atrocity and begins to do some justice to one of the largest and least known genocides in history. - 42
The A.V. Club
Even if it weren’t about an atrocity, this training-wheels Doctor Zhivago would still be lame. - 40
Village Voice
A subject like the Holodomor demands something more than a TV-movie aesthetic and pitched battle scenes featuring a couple dozen combatants. - 40
Time Out London
This forgotten chapter of history deserves to be better told. - 40
Arizona Republic
Bitter Harvest, bless its low-budget heart, means well. But George Mendeluk’s film, about the Holodomor, the forced famine and starvation that killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians, falls well short of its ambitions. - 38
The Seattle Times
Despite the stakes, Mendeluk can’t scare up any particular urgency, largely because everything is so contrived and inauthentic.
