Andrey Petrovich
A group of children gets into a dangerous adventure while trying to help the adults to supply water for the village. At any rate, they are courageous and won't give up.
Early XIX century. Gloomy home lender Gobseck in a suburb of Paris — a silent witness of human tragedy and ruined lives. The power of money equalizes people of different classes and positions, forcing the usurer to ask humbly for a loan. But mountains of rotting goods, gold and silver scrap do not bring happiness to Gobseck. From his own greed he loses his mind and dies..
Directed by Yuri Zhelyabuzhsky.
Governor von Wahl / Old Rabbi
This 1928 film features stylized cinematography and actors from the Moscow Art Theater in a fiction story based on the life of Jewish Labor Bund member Hirsch Lekert who attempted to assassinate the Vilna governor in 1902 to avenge the flogging of workers who participated in a May Day rally.
Originally titled Wings of a Serf in the USSR, this Russian historical pageant (original title: Krylya Kholopa) manages to pack a lot of detail -- and a great deal of nonsense -- into its scant 60 minutes. Throwing accuracy to the four winds, the screenplay deals with a fabricated romantic triangle involving 16th-century Czar Ivan (Leonid Leonidov), his wife the Czarina (Sofya Askarova) and his wife's paramour Nikita (Ivan Klyukvin). The celebrated brutality of Ivan is crystallized in a single moment wherein the czar throws a bowl of scalding soup into the face of his court jester. American critics who'd grown weary of the praise lavished on such Soviet classics as Potemkin seemed to delight in pointing out the deficiencies of Czar Ivan, the Terrible, as if to say "See? They aren't all classics!" Nonetheless, the film did record business when it opened at New York's Cameo Theater in March of 1928, two years after its original release. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi
"Bread" - a Bolshevik propaganda tale about the fundaments of living.
