Olga Bazanova

Goga is a Russian man who has no luck with women. He has a chance meeting with Mary Pickford, and after she kisses him on the cheek, he becomes as irresistible as her.

The son and daughter of a lost-at-sea captain recruit help to find him on the basis of an incomplete note found in a bottle, and encounter adventures in Patagonia, Australia, and New Zealand.

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.

The tragic story of a young woman named Yulia, who fell in love with a married man and lost her only child.

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...

A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution.