USSR

PLOT:
Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov (and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration. The trio’s first assignment was a documentary celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of ode-in-pictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such, deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.Read More »

The first movie of director Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov.

Synopsis: Farukh and his little brother were raised by their grandmother in a remote village in Tajikistan, since the separation of their parents. One day, they decide to go back to their father, who is a doctor in a town near the Afghan border. Farukh intends to leave his brother at his father’s before leaving. This is the story of their journey.Read More »

Quote:
***One of the best 150 films I have ever seen.***

Three years before Andrei Tarkovsky made his first feature film Ivanovo Detstvo (1962) and became one of the most extraordinary directors of all time, war veteran Grigori Chukhrai wrote and directed a memorable and considerably beloved anti-war statement called Ballada o Soldate. This beautiful cinematographic achievement was basically one of the first films that accurately portrayed the human side of people that were involved in the war and the cataclysmic aftermath caused in an environment surrounded by hopelessness and chaos.Read More »

Quote:
Grigorii Grebner and Anatolii Lunacharskii adapted Lunacharskii’s play (based on a story by Prosper Merimee) to the screen. Since it was yet another glaring example of the commercial “line” of the studio Mezhrabpom Rus’, “The Bear’s Wedding” was an odd effort indeed for the Commissar of Enlightenment to be associated with.Read More »

Soviet solidarity is strong in Germany where the Communist Party (KPD) marches under the clenched fist in spite of police harassment… Radio broadcasts reach all parts of the Soviet Union, including Magnitogorsk. On the steppe near the city, a family of nomads lives in their yurt. The father hears blasting: iron ore for the steelworks. Crushed ore and coke yield molten steel for the ladle. Stop-motion animation shows the bountiful tractor and freight car output of the future… A new blast-furnace is under construction. Accepting jobs at the site are women, ethnic minorities, and the nomad. An English-speaking engineer supervises; a young riveter learns his trade from an old hand… In the Kubass region, miners labour to produce the coal which becomes coke in Magnitogorsk… At last the blast-furnace is complete. Workers celebrate. A cheerful patriotic song is sung. Steel pours forth. The new day reveals a finished plant.Read More »

Young hobos are brought to a new camp to become good Soviet citizens. This camp works without any guards, and it works well. But crooks kill one of the young people when they try to damage the newly build railroad to that camp.Read More »

Synopsis:
Police gets a call-out to a lonely hotel in the Alps. When an officer gets to the hotel everything seems to be alright. Suddenly an avalanche cuts them out from the rest of the world and strange things are going to happen. Seems that some visitors may be extraterrestrial.Read More »

A young farmer and his lazy father try to help with the construction of the Dniprohes, but he learns that strength is not enough for a worker and joins the Communist party.Read More »

A remarkable rarity, Dovzhenko’s unfinished final film was a response to the atmosphere of intrigues and espionage – real or imagined – that dominated the early Cold War era. In protest of the intensifying postwar anti-communist witch hunt, American journalist Annabelle Bucard emigrated to Russia and became a Soviet citizen; her book, The Truth About American Diplomats, was published in English and Russian in 1949. That book, and aspects of Ms. Bucard’s life, formed the basis for FAREWELL, AMERICA. Shortly after the Allied victory, an idealistic “Anna Bedford” gets a job in Moscow at the U.S. Embassy, which she promptly discovers is crawling with spies.Read More »