USSR

Summary from the dafilms website:
The silent film shot in 1934 narrates in detail the severe process of eviction of the population and their fierce struggle against the swamp in Mengralian marshland of Georgia…

According to the legend the deity of the swamp Ujmuri drags down to its bosom anyone who dares come near. And the best of them are forced to marry her. Kavtar and Tsiru fell in love with each other and started their battle to dry up the swamp. Everyone who believes the legend is against it, including Tsiru’s father.Read More »

Two Soviet partisans on a mission to gather food contend with the winter cold, the occupying Germans, and their own psyches.

Letterboxd review by Lara Pop ★★★★½:
It rarely gets bleaker than The Ascent. Larisa Shepitko’s tale of perseverance in the face of imminent death surprised me on several counts. For the first half of the movie, I couldn’t figure out the significance of the title. If anything, Shepitko presents its exact opposite. The barren, snow-covered landscape, where death lurks in every grinding step man takes, devours the movie in its all-consuming white death. The shaky camera movement enhances every sound made in the white silence as the camera zooms in on man’s face and outlines the thin crust of ice scratching his cheek with its cold tendrils, stretching, reaching, with one goal in mind: to get to the innermost layer: the spirit; and to break it. It is a tableau of a frostbitten feast, an icy infusion of a deathly descent, straight into the vein. I couldn’t figure out why I was watching a film named its exact opposite.Read More »

“”People living near a by-station, sincerely envied passengers of the passing trains. Arina, a homely lonely woman of about 40 was a cook at the station. Once the pointsman Gomozov dropped in to see her in the kitchen. The lonely man had recently lost his family and asked her to sew a couple of shirts for him. And then he asked her to come to his place in the evening to have some tea and talk just out of boredom. Arina left him at daybreak. But soon people at the station learnt about their relationship…”” kinoglaz.frRead More »

Osvobozhdeniye AKA Liberation

Liberation features events of the Soviet occupation of western Ukraine, at the time a part of Poland, after the out-break of the Second World War in September 1939. Following official Soviet historiography, the film presents the annexation of Western Ukraine, the result of the Nazi-Bolshevik partition of Poland, as the historic act of “reunification of all Ukrainian lands into one Soviet-Ukrainian state.” Scenes include: a Hutsul village public meeting addressed by Dovzhenko himself; the opening of the People’s Assembly of Western Ukraine in L’viv, October 26th, 1939; the opening of the People’s Assembly in Bialystok; adoption of the act of reunification of Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian SSR by the Ukrainian Soviet Parliament in Kyiv and by the Supreme Soviet in Moscow.Read More »

Michurin aka Life in Bloom
The film is about the life and work of the prominent Russian biologist Ivan Michurin. Reports of gardener-Michurin’s extraordinary experiments with plants reach far beyond the borders of the Russian empire. Trying to persuade him to move to the United States, a group of Americans comes to the village where Michurin lives. They promise him all kinds of benefits. But Michurin, despite his lack of recognition by the government, is devoted to Russia. Overcoming obstacles created by the tsarist bureaucracy, the scientist continues with his experiments on natural selection and dreams of the time when all people will be able to take full advantage of his achievements. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 makes his dreams come true and Michurin’s orchard in Kozlov becomes a center of Soviet experimental biology.
Awards. Stalin National Prize of the Second Degree, 1949. The Labor Prize at the Gottwaldov (now Zlin) Film Festival, Czechoslovakia, 1949.Read More »

Ivan (1932)
Cinemapoem about building of Dniproges (Dnieper Hydroelectric Station), about the fate of rural fellow which comes together with other boys and girls to build one of most buildings of socialist industrial construction. Narrates the language of the poetic cinema of O. Dovzhenko about the process of alteration of consciousness of rural fellow due to industrialization.
Recipient of an award on ICF in Venice in 1934.Read More »

An engineer in charge of the production line of a factory in Moscow is sent to a small town to try to specify the distributor the new dimensions of a mechanic part they need. But in this town everybody seems to be crazy (a secretary who works naked, a group of people take the engineer as a rock & roll player, etc) and, in addition, this man is witness of a suicide, so he is trapped inside the town.Read More »

The year is 1919. German troops retreat from Ukraine. The Directory, the Ukrainian national government lead by Symon Petliura, takes control of Kyiv. Meanwhile, the Bolshevik division commanded by Mykola Shchors is marching on the capital. The Bolsheviks capture the cities of Vinnytsia, Zhmerynka, and others one by one, but lose Berdychiv to Petliura’s forces. They are demoralized by the defeat. By his personal example of courage and military skill, Shchors inspires the retreating Red troops and leads them to victory over the enemy.Read More »

Description:
Based on the novel «A Ticket to the Stars» by V. Aksenov. After final examinations at school four friends went to Tallinn for the first time without annoying surveillance of their parents to taste serious life.Read More »