Valeri Solovtsov

An adaptation of Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave,” about a musician dying of hunger in his large, unheated Petersburg apartment because he was not needed in the revolutionary city.

Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train window sparks the return of his memory. He makes his way back to St. Petersburg, now Leningrad, a man out of time who struggles to make sense of the new society brought about by the revolution.

The film tells the story of an ordinary guy Anton Kandidov. First he works on agricultural work — transports on boat on Volga watermelons. Noticing how deftly Anton catches and loads watermelons, he is told that he could become a goalkeeper and play football. And he decides to follow the advice. On the way to the glory of the goalkeeper and waiting for his victory and disappointment.

The peaceful life of an exemplary collective farm is being rent asunder by shortages and dissent, and a commissar is sent to uncover the source of the problems, unaware that their is actual sabotage involved.

Red Partisans

Mstitel

A young country girl who becomes an apple seller is seduced and abandoned. She finds a protector but when he is arrested for theft she finds honest work in a factory.

Central Asia during the Civil War. The Jarkent battalion of the Red Army, located in the Verny (now Alma-Ata), receives an order from Frunze to go to the Fergana region to fight the Basmachi. A group of kulaks, with the support of local merchants and beys, incites the unconscious, wavering mass of the Red Army to revolt. The anti-Soviet agitation of counter-revolutionaries, demagogically exploiting the mood of war weariness, provokes an open mutiny in the battalion.

This little known Russian movie, from the director of the following year's Oblomok imperii/ A Fragment of Empire is both surprising and accomplished. The mute cobbler is interested in the local girl but she is already pregnant by one of the gang of sailor suit toughs. The Soviet Youth League secretary's only assistance to her is a book about sex in Russian literature and things turn nasty.

Japanese forces land in the port of Vladivostok during Russian civil war, supporting anti-communist forces, while local population joins Far Eastern Republic and partisans in the struggle against the intervention and White army.