The seamy Jewish underworld of Odesa is the setting for Isaac Babel's story based on the life of gangster king Mishka Yaponchik "Mike the Jap" Vinnitsky. Murder is a way of life for Benya and his gang until he finds himself ensnared in a Bolshevik trap.
The defeated remnants of vile Ukrainian nationalists, headed by the leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement, Symon Petliura, cannot accept their historical fate and are plotting an insurrection against the Soviet regime in Ukraine. There is nothing Petliura and his cohorts would not do to win...
At the "Pupky" station, an opportunity occurs: two illegal passengers - guinea pigs - have to be disembarked from one of the trains, since animals cannot be transported in a general carriage. The head of the station Pryvychkin tries to help the animals, but the situation is beyond his control. The...
The year 1929. A “shock worker” from a tractor plant visits a film studio premises and is furious to see fake stage designs for a kitsch production about a Soviet life. He refuses to help the crew with his tractor, but is happy to ask one of the cameramen to go with him to visit an actual...
This revolutionary epic likens the push for industrialization of Soviet Ukraine with the battle for Perekop during the Civil War. A missing plow blade is presented as a symbol of the country's backward peasant economy that needs to be transformed in the course of the industrial construction. In an...