Mikhail Vysotsky

Growing up in a Ukrainian peasant family, knowing all hardships of serf life, young artist and poet Taras Shevchenko in the years of study clearly identifies the meaning of true art, which is to serve the interests of the people. The poems of Shevchenko are imbued with love for the common people. Fiery freedom-loving creativity of Taras Shevchenko is known throughout Russia. Nicholas I exiles the poet to the distant Caspian fort where he is to serve as an ordinary soldier and is banned from writing or drawing. In the poet's difficult days he has the support of Ukrainian soldier Skobelev, Polish revolutionary Sierakowski, captain Kosarev and the commandant of the fortress, Uskov. For the sake of his release Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov are hard at work. And so, the sick and aged Shevchenko is finally free. Together with Chernyshevsky and Dobrolyubov, he dreams of a bright future of the motherland, when the Russian and Ukrainian peoples throw off the chains of slavery.

The war is over. The Red Army soldier Pyotr tries to find himself in a peaceful life. He takes the place of an accountant, and long-time friend Nazar, who has already grown to the post of the head of a collective farm, helps him in this. Together they achieve high performance indicators of their wards, skillfully solving controversial issues and emerging from confused situations.

The Soviet intelligence officer Martha Shirke honorably fulfills the command mission, but the Nazis expose her ...

At the height of the season, the famous football player leaves his team: he is a motorcycle designer and his presence at the factory is necessary. However, he does not give up football, but becomes the center of attack of the city team. His goalkeeper friend stubbornly regards the hero’s departure as a betrayal ...

The Vityaz sailing corvette, whose team has to endure severe trials, goes on a flight. Relations between the sailors and the stupid and soulless baron von Berg replacing the senior officer did not develop. By his behavior, he causes the hatred of the whole crew, which develops into a riot when he gives the order to drown the darling of the whole team - a little puppy. All this, as well as a storm in the Pacific Ocean and other dangerous adventures, rally people even more and make them even stronger and more courageous.

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.

Year 1648. Ukraine under the oppression of Poland. Polish nobility committing outrage, burning villages one after another. Hetman of Zaporozhian Cossacks Bogdan Khmelnitsky gathers the army of defenders of the motherland...

A cheerful comedy about the life of the peripheral town of the late 30s. Despite its remoteness from the center, the town lives a busy life: new houses are being built, old streets are becoming cramped. In order not to break the old buildings, the young inventor suggests moving them, as they already did on Gorky Street in Moscow ...