On the last night of the year, the folkloric spirits of a Russian forest abandon their usual haunts and crowd around one table to see the old year out. In the Thirteenth Hour of the Night, a 1969 Soviet fantasy-comedy, turns that gathering into a strange, gently mocking party.
What is In the Thirteenth Hour of the Night about?
The household spirit, the water dweller, the barn keeper, the small gremlin and the forest goblin all converge at Baba Yaga's hut for a shared New Year celebration, trading grievances and old rivalries the way distant relatives do at a holiday table. Their evening tips over when an unexplained guest arrives from nowhere and joins the circle. At first the newcomer is welcomed as a curiosity, but the spirits' games and squabbling soon wear thin, and the visitor drifts off in search of livelier company elsewhere. The film treats its creatures less as monsters than as a cranky extended family, using their bickering to needle at very human habits of vanity, boredom, and one-upmanship, all wrapped inside a compact seventy-minute runtime.
About the cast
The ensemble includes Zinoviy Gerdt, Anatoliy Papanov, Georgiy Vitsin, Viktor Baykov, Natalya Drozhzhina, Vyacheslav Tsaryov, Spartak Mishulin and Andrei Makarenko, several of them familiar faces from Soviet-era comic cinema and dubbing work of the period. The cast leans into the material's theatrical, almost fable-like staging, letting each spirit register as a distinct personality rather than a generic folklore type.
Context & significance
The film draws on figures pulled straight from Slavic house and forest folklore rather than an invented mythology, which gives its comedy a familiar shape for audiences who grew up on those tales while still playing as pure fantasy for anyone new to them. Its 1969 release places it alongside a run of Soviet genre pictures that used fable and fairy-tale material to slip past the era's stricter dramatic conventions, favoring mood and mischief over a tightly plotted story. At a lean seventy minutes, it moves briskly between vignettes rather than building a single sustained arc.
Watching In the Thirteenth Hour of the Night on Ktime
The title streams on K-Time as part of a Persian-focused catalogue built for the diaspora, with a Farsi-language interface throughout the site. Watching does require a K-Time account, though this page and its background details are free to read without logging in first. No Persian dub or subtitle track is currently attached to this particular title.