Alitet Leaves for the Hills

Directed by Mark Donskoy.

A life-long story of a romantic school teacher who left imperial St. Petersburg for teaching country children. Driven by noble intentions to enlighten people and examples by 1880s revolutionary "People's Will" member teachers, a young woman spent her life in a village and evidenced the changes a Russian village has undergone from pre-revolutionary tsarist times to late 1940s.

My Universities (Moi universiteti) is the last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in My Childhood (1938) and a torturous sojourn as a serf in My Apprenticeship), future writer Gorki (Alexei Lyarsky) reaches maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and artistic freedom. The "university" of the title is actual the school of Hard Knocks, as Gorky goes to work in the shipyards and commisserates with the hard-drinking, philosophical dockworkers. Donskoy's depiction of street life under the Czarist regime of the late 19th century as unrelentingly depressing, filled with disenfranchised derelicts. This, of course, was meant to be a contrast to the "perfection" of the Stalin years. We can forgive this propagandizing in the light of Donskoy's indisputable cinematic brilliance.

A coming-of-age story about a flute-playing boy from the Mari people, a national minority who lived near the Volga, and how he is educated by the Soviet state.

An adaptation of a story by Mikhailo Kotsyubinsky, a Ukrainian writer executed in the Stalinist purges but rehabilitated in 1955, that anticipates the Ukrainian "poetic cinema" of the '60s in its focus on star-crossed lovers and its celebration of nature. Set in the 1830s, the film follows two lovers on the run - a girl forced into marriage and her boyfriend, a serf who's being sought by the authorities - as they try to make their way to freedom.

Set in the high North, this tale of a russian teacher who bengins to educate the children of the Chukchi tribe reinforces de director's firm belief in the power of education to overcome distrust and establish a shared civilizational foundation for all human beings.

A sad story about a little Japanese girl fighting heavy decease in a Russian summer camp on the Black Sea coast.

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.

Family drama centering on the childhood of Vladimir Lenin, then Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, in the city of Simbirsk, and his relationship with his mother.