Varvara Alyokhina

Working with children led Barskaya to create superb direct sound and an inspired style of shooting. Don’t look for conventional cinematic syntax here. The film is chaotic in the way that Soviet films still knew how to be, and Langlois couldn’t help but be seduced by its rebellious spirit, its anarchy and love of children, comparable to Vigo’s Zero de conduite. As well as being a film made with and for children, it offers a complex take on Western society. Pre-Nazi Germany is not named as such but is carefully reconstructed, possibly under advice from Karl Radek, and children offer a playful reflection of class struggle – doubly excluded, as proletarians and as minors. “They play in the same way that they live”, one intertitle says. The interaction between their comical games and the yet more ludicrous ones played by adults is developed on several levels.

Mrs. von Walz and her daughter Alice live in an old Moscow mansion. A Bolshevik sailor named Ivanov moves into their apartment. When Alice learns that the tenant holds a prominent position and receives a generous ration, she embarks on an adventure and marries the tenant. However, their first child does not bring happiness to the couple. Exhausted by the monotony, the wife starts her own small business and neglects her husband. Ivanov leaves home, settles in a forest village, and soon marries a peasant girl...

Jacob, a farmer, returns from the war to his wife Marie and begs the landlord baron for a plot of land to rent. The Baron grants the request, but only for a barren, rocky, useless acreage. The pair struggle to make do on this land, but then the Baron demands that Maria leave her husband to serve as wet nurse to his married daughter Anya's new baby, on threat of eviction. While nursing the daughter's baby, Maria receives unwelcome attentions from the daughter's husband, and a scandal erupts, ruining Maria in her husband's eyes. When she escapes from her employers and seeks to return home, the police give her the yellow passport signifying a prostitute, further degrading her. She approaches home, unsure of the reception that awaits her.

Fearing the Soviet Union, rich businessmen who want more influence in Europe decide to give the nation of Boufferia a new king, an easy to handle drunkard.

Konstantin Eggert both directed and starred as Count Shemet, cursed by his insane mother’s traumatic experience with a bear to have seizures during which he himself becomes a “bear” on the kill.

Early XIX century. Gloomy home lender Gobseck in a suburb of Paris — a silent witness of human tragedy and ruined lives. The power of money equalizes people of different classes and positions, forcing the usurer to ask humbly for a loan. But mountains of rotting goods, gold and silver scrap do not bring happiness to Gobseck. From his own greed he loses his mind and dies..