Grigori Dolgov

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 focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory. The film is at its most grimly effective in a long sequence wherein the Nazis conduct a search for Jewish escapees, culminating in a horribly graphic re-creation of the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar. While Donskoi was critically lambasted for his cinematic "sloppyiness" during this sequence (hand-held camera, rapid cuts etc.), it can now be seen that he was attempting a realistic, documentarylike interpretation of this infamous Nazi atrocity.

Episodic story of the resistance to the German invasion of Ukraine in 1918 during World War 1, and made as an example of the guerrilla warfare and fierce spirit in which Ukrainian peasants were again resisting Teuton onslaughts in 1939. Highlights a small band of guerrillas and their battles using scythes, shotguns and, often, just clubs against the Kaiser's army in the Ukrainian forests.

Ilf and Petrov's only work in cinema is a comedy about the adventures of two passionate car enthusiasts during a road trip. On their way to Moscow in a car assembled from scrap materials, they meet a charlatan—a "professor" with a pretty niece. Convinced that the "professor" is a common swindler, the friends turn him in to the police, while they themselves continue on their way with the girl and are the first to reach one of Moscow's squares—the finish line of the road trip.

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 end of the 1920s. Lumbermen of small American village begin a strike. The strike committee included communists, the Smith brothers and the black lumberjack Murray. The fascist Dan dismisses rumors about a affair between Murray and a white girl, Gladys, the sister of the Smith brothers…