Known for Acting
In the first half of the 17th century, the peasant Nazar Stodolya, sentenced to death by the Polish magnate Haletsky, is rescued by his friend Hnat. Later, Nazar and Hnat find themselves in the estate of the Ukrainian centurion Kichaty. The centurion, having invited a priest, persuades the fugitives to sign a paper stating that they have voluntarily been assigned to Kichaty's estate. Hnat does not sign the paper, and Nazar, falling in love with the owner's daughter Halia, easily puts his signature and thus falls into another bondage. Soon, Hnat leads the people's struggle against the oppressors, and Nazar and Halya join the rebels.
A film based on the life of the Russian scientist, Klement Timiriazev, who taught at Cambridge and Oxford and was awarded the Newton Mantle for his work. Timiriazev, one of the few outstanding Russian scientists who (publically) backed the Soviets in their revolutionary campaign, was later elected a delegate to the Leningrad Soviet by the sailors of the Baltic fleet. There he denounced his fellow scientists for failing to aid the Soviets and predicted that such aid would come.
The life was cruel with Ivas. The landlord sent him at war, and his girlfriend – in the house of ill fame. In the troops an ordinary peasant gets acquainted with an ideological revolutionary and becomes inspired with the feeling of inequity to the existing social structure. And when the time comes to return to the native village, he will make the sir pays by his blood for all wrong-doings against the peasants. A film based on works and biography of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko (1814 - 1861).
To help out his friend Lenya, Yura steals a Stradivarius violin belonging to the professor from his grandfather, a violin maker. Having learned about everything, the professor begins to study with the talented Lenya. Circus performers persuade Lenya to give up the violin and perform in the circus...
The film attempts to display an episode of the liberation movement in Ukraine - the uprising of Kolievs (serfs, artisans and fishermen) against the tyranny of the feudal lords and the Polish nobility, which ended with a brutal massacre performed by a Russian punitive expedition in 1768.
After the critical lambasting of his masterpiece Earth, Dovzhenko returned with a more popular iteration of its main motifs. Much like Earth, Ivan concerns itself with the natural rhythms of country life, disrupted by the beat of looming industrialisation.
At the school where worker Nikolai Zhikharev studied, students were given a lot of theoretical information, but how to work with machinery was not explained. Therefore, on one of the first working days at the plant Zhikharev made a serious mistake - he let steam out of the boiler. He was transferred to the clerk's office, but even there difficulties awaited the hero. However, Zhikharev did not give up. He decided to change the educational process in schools so that trained and prepared workers would come to the factories.
The film recreates the events of 1905. In the center of the picture is the struggle of the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik party, against tsarism. The demonstration of labor unrest is replaced by episodes of the Russo-Japanese war, Black-Hundred demonstrations, accompanied by a pogrom of Jews, and beating of the intelligentsia. The film paints the attitude of the Mensheviks towards armed insurrection, reproduces the picture of barricade battles, the arrest of the Council of Workers' Deputies and the brutal reprisals of the tsarist autocracy with revolutionaries.
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 Soviet village. There they witness the birth of the kolkhoz and the dekulakization of wealthy villagers. Then they are transported to the future, to the year 1932, when the first five-year plan is done and the commune-sovkhoz is established. Movies can move faster than time, but the pace of change in Soviet society is even faster than that. In the movie, the entrance gate of the Odesa film factory, where all of the indoors scenes were shot, can be seen. The outdoors scenes were filmed all over Eastern Ukraine and Southern Russia (Kuban): at Kharkiv factories, in Ukrainian villages and in the 240 ha-sovkhoz “Gigant” in Rostov region, the latter representing the future after the five-year plan.
Vasyl, a member of the Komsomol, with the help of a local party organization, gets a tractor and plows private boundaries "on kulak fields". However, this enthusiasm will cost him dearly.
