Kvartaly predmestya (52 minutes, USSR 1930, directed by Grigoriy Gritcher-Tchrikover) and it is about the cohabitation of a young Jewish woman (played by Nana Vatchnadze, a Soviet film star of those times) and a Ukrainian. This film pays attention to mutual national and religious stereotypes.
Ukrainian agitprop film from 1929 that was banned and long forgotten until its rediscovery in the 1970s, imaginatively shot by the gifted cameraman Oleksii Pankratiev, whose panoramic long shots feature dynamic compositions. The background, barren field and bare sky, raise the agricultural subject matter to the level of an epic poem. Using innovative editing, Shpykovskyi transformed an incredibly simple plot into an avant-garde work. Created the same year as Earth (Zemlya), the film forms a paradoxically conceptual, ideological, and aesthetic pair with Dovzhenko’s movie.
An opportunistic Kyivan Apollon Shmyguyev, whose peaceful bourgeois life is interrupted by the civil war, decides to wait out the trouble in the South of Ukraine, which is under the rule of the Russian White Army. After gathering left off goods on Andriyivskyi descent in Kyiv, he goes on a journey with a camel, which somehow had strayed to his house. In the midway he is stopped by the Red Army: the camel gets confiscated for the needs of revolution, and Apollon appears in the disposal of the Bolshevik commissar. Zealous and cunning, Apollon quickly takes lead of the local commissariat. But the ingrained thirst for a profit once again puts his life in danger.
