It is an existential film about Earth and unlike how it is represented as young woman, full of energy by Dovzhenko, but as old one, who has five adult children. This one family exemplifies today's life in Ukraine, its daily troubles and hardship of oligarchic feudalism that caused the change of survival strategies for simple rural family. Instead of resting in the shade of white acacias the old man Ivan and his wife Stepanyda struggle to survive the crisis. When their elder son died, they learn how to live further. Film develops the topic of "life and death", as through the prism of personal tragedy, but also in a social sense of Ukrainian village decline. And if today the EU countries are expressing a "deep concern" about the events in Ukraine, then at the Stalinist era of the agricultural Ukraine suppression and Terror-Famine the world preferred to keep silence.
