Cinema
Earth
Земля
Oleksandr Dovzhenko · 1930
Synopsis
In a Ukrainian village, old Semen dies under a pear tree, surrounded by his family. His grandson Vasyl, who leads the young collective farm, obtains the first tractor, which the whole village comes to watch arrive; with it he ploughs up the boundary strips that separated the fields of the rich peasants, and they, Khoma at their head, do not forgive him.
Context
Third part of Dovzhenko's Ukrainian trilogy, the film was shot mainly in the Poltava region, photographed by Danylo Demutsky, with Semen Svashenko, Stepan Shkurat and Yulia Solntseva; Levko Revutsky wrote the music. On 4 April 1930, the poet Demyan Bedny savaged it in Izvestia, attacking in particular the scene of the naked fiancée; the film was released in Kyiv on 8 April with cuts and was withdrawn from the bill about ten days later, while it was being screened in Germany, France and England. It was on the programme at Venice in 1932 and was restored in 1971 and then in 2012.
Who it is for
A silent film of about an hour and a quarter, lyrical in construction; the collectivisation of the Ukrainian countryside is its setting. The version restored in 2012 is accompanied by the group DakhaBrakha.
Prizes and reception
Named in 1958, at the Brussels World's Fair, among the twelve best films of all time; second among the hundred best films of Ukrainian cinema.
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