[projekktor id=’27171′]

Bitter Harvest is a historical drama directed by George Mendeluk. The film is set in the Ukraine during the 1930s and was shot on location in the country. The film stars Max Irons, Samantha Barks, Barry Pepper, Tamer Hassan, Lucy Brown, and Terence Stamp.

As Stalin advances the ambitions of communists in the Kremlin, a young artist named Yuri ( Max Irons ) battles to survive famine, imprisonment and torture to save his childhood sweetheart Natalka ( Samantha Barks ) from the “Holodomor,” the death‑by‑starvation program that ultimately killed millions of Ukrainians. Against this tragic backdrop, Yuri escapes from a Soviet prison and joins the anti‑Bolshevik resistance movement as he battles to reunite with Natalka and continue the fight for a free Ukraine.

The film was written by Richard Bachynsky‑Hoover and produced by Ian Ihnatowycz, both Ukrainian Canadians. Ihnatowycz was surprised to find that the Holodomor wasn’t adapted for the big screen. “I discovered there had been a few documentaries and some interesting Ukrainian‑language films portraying the Holodomor, but there hadn’t really been any English‑language features,” he says. “I became intrigued by the opportunity and understood the importance of telling the story of this terrible famine genocide to a much broader global audience. I wanted to portray it in a way that touched human sensibilities so that audiences could experience the emotion of what happened in Ukraine.”