A country landowner loses his way in the woods while hunting, and discovers a beautiful woman and her elderly grandmother living in a bog, ostracized from society as witches. He is enchanted into a forbidden love. Based on Aleksandr Kuprin's novel of the same name, OLESYA portrays witches as the victims of a malicious society, rather than a malignant force of evil. Made at Kiev's Dovzhenko Studios, Boris Ivchenko's sombre pastoral romance was shot in a glorious folk tableaux like that of his studio colleagues Sergei Paradjanov and Yuri Ilyenko.