Vanka and the 'Avenger'

Ukrainian silent courtroom drama about the trial on charges of Menachem Mendel Beilis in the ritual murder of 12-year-old Andrey Yushchinsky. Menahem Mendel Beilis was a Ukrainian Jew accused of ritual murder in Kyiv, in the then Russian Empire, in a notorious 1913 trial, known as the Beilis trial or Beilis affair.

The defeated remnants of vile Ukrainian nationalists, headed by the leader of the Ukrainian liberation movement, Symon Petliura, cannot accept their historical fate and are plotting an insurrection against the Soviet regime in Ukraine. There is nothing Petliura and his cohorts would not do to win back control over Ukraine, including selling it to the highest bidder, in this case, the Polish dictator Jozef Pilsudski. A group of plotters are coordinating an insurrection in Kyiv with an attack from Poland headed by Petliura’s general Yurko Tiutiunnyk. Predictably, the invincible Red Army defeats the nationalist plotters and proves that the Soviet borders are impregnable.

In the first years of NEP, one of the committees Relief for Starving evacuates an orphan girl Mariika from a starving village into a city. Mariika runs away on the way over.

Children from working class neighborhoods wearing patched-up clothes have fun in Kyiv streets - they slide down showy slopes, walk on the brink of a precipice and even conquer the light ice of the Dnieper river. They can see, how rich people live, only through a gap in the fence. The boy Fedko who is called "a tearaway" because of his naughty and disobedient character comes up with some risky entertainment, and adults often punish him for this while his friends do respect him.

This terrifying film documentary shows candid shots of the victims of hostilities and life in war-torn cities during the Soviet-Ukrainian war.