A life-long story of a romantic school teacher who left imperial St. Petersburg for teaching country children. Driven by noble intentions to enlighten people and examples by 1880s revolutionary "People's Will" member teachers, a young woman spent her life in a village and evidenced the changes a...
My Universities (Moi universiteti) is the last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in My Childhood and a torturous sojourn as a serf in My Apprenticeship, future writer Gorki reaches maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and...
This literary adaptation was one of only two films made during World War II on the subject of the Civil War following the Bolshevik Revolution, as attention by filmmakers and viewers shifted away from past history and toward the current conflict.
Young Maxim grows up under the czarist regime with his grandparents as guardians. Continually demeaned by his martinet grandfather, Maxim is drawn to his warm-hearted grandmother, who instills in him the willingness to pursue his writing muse.
Second entry in Ukrainian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Picking up where 1938's My Childhood left off, the story covers the years in Gorki's life when the future writer (Alexei Lyarsky) was on his own, looking for a purpose and place in life.
A coming-of-age story about a flute-playing boy (Yyvan Kyrla) from the Mari people, a national minority who lived near the Volga, and how he is educated by the Soviet state.
The film tells about the childhood and youth of the wife, friend and military ally of the founder of the country of the Soviets Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. The main attention in the film is paid to the participation of a young revolutionary in the organization of the struggle of the workers...
An adaptation of a story by a Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky that anticipates the Ukrainian "poetic cinema" of the '60s in its focus on star-crossed lovers and its celebration of nature. Set in the 1830s, the film follows two lovers on the run - a girl forced into marriage and her...
The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olga (Nataliya Uzhviy), a Soviet partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruelest of arbitrary tortures at...
Timid old woman Pelageya Nilovna observes the revolutionary activities of her son Pavel Vlasov and gradually comes to realize that his cause is a great and noble one. She involves herself in the movement and finds joy and great courage in her new life as a revolutionary. Based on Gorky's novel,...
Foma Gordeyev, the son of a wealthy Volga merchant, doesn't want to continue his father's work. The mind is sickened by the dirt and injustice of life around him. Foma is seeking solace in a drunken rampage and wild antics. After many years of desolation, he is half-ill at the opening of a night...
A bold study on the dangers of prostitution in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. It's sort of dramatic fiction that tells the story of Lyuba, which after irremediable events, loses his honor, being obliged to exercise the oldest profession in the world to survive. She hopes for better days and a new...
Mark Donskoy went to the wilds of Siberia to film this Soviet movie about a community that resists the temptations of a wicked American capitalist who wants to exploit their lands.
Russian filmmaker Mark Donskoi, of "The Gorky Trilogy" fame, was responsible for the postwar Soviet drama The Taras Family (originally Nepokorenniye, and also released as Unvanquished and Unconquered). A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The drama...
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.
