The Sky Calls

Group of youngsters find a sunken sailboat used by guerrillas during WWII, raise it, repair it, and sail out to sea for adventure.

The script about loneliness, conformity and the impossibility of creative realization scared the editorial censorship at the studio, and then at Derzhkino. A lot of claims were made against him. The demands for amendments and endless additions and rewrites by the authors lasted for about a year. The original version of the title "Na pokhony!" ("To bow down!") was replaced by "To Dream and to Live". According to Pylyp Ilyenko, the director's eldest son, this name appeared "as a result of censor pressure." Censorship stopped the tape 40 times: at the stage of the literary script, director's, during film tests (the actors were not approved), filming, etc. The film catastrophically fell apart into fragments, into masterfully filmed, but unrelated scenes. The director called the finished version a "dead film".

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.

Soviet agent Fedotov is air-dropped into Nazi occupied land. He changes over into Mr. Ekhert, a German entrepreneur wishing to take advantage of eastern worker slave labor in occupied Ukraine. Ekhert (Fedotov) enters into a partnership with a German entrepreneur who's son, Willie, is a high ranking Nazi. Together they go to Vinnitsa, Ukraine and start a factory. Fedotov begins seeking contacts with headquarters, but faces problems when a Ukrainian Nazi collaborator manages to infiltrate the Soviet partisans.

Timid old woman Pelageya Nilovna observes the revolutionary activities of her son Pavel Vlasov and gradually comes to realize that his cause is a great and noble one. She involves herself in the movement and finds joy and great courage in her new life as a revolutionary.

The film tells about the struggle of the Donbas miners in Ukrainian SSR with saboteurs.