Yunona Yakovchenko

Trofim Bessarab has been working as a house painter for all his life. He is a pensioner now and it seems that he can let himself have a rest. But idleness is not for Trofim. His nature is to be a working man and he looks for the way to apply his irrepressible energy, he possesses despite his age.

A comedy about how a single telegram can mess things up.

No plot available for this movie.

Back in the thirties, Anton Lutenko was forced to leave Lviv and seek success abroad. His wife died during the war, and his daughter Tanya went missing. Anton found the job he dreamed of abroad and became a famous coach. Italian Julia became his impresario, friend and wife. One day, Anton was brought a Soviet magazine, on the cover of which was a young gymnast, master of sports Tatiana Lutsenko. Anton is flying to Kiev with a team of Italian gymnasts. Exciting days of happy experiences and meetings are ahead...

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.