Aerograd

Director: Oleksandr Dovzhenko

1935 / 87min / 35mm

Set in the Soviet Far East in the not-too-distant future, Dovzhenko’s film takes its title from a fictitious Siberian city that, as home to a strategically vital airfield, is targeted for conquest by the duplicitous forces of the Japanese Empire. A vision of technological utopianism and natural splendor, composed with dash and dynamism by cinematographer Eduard Tissé—a regular Eisenstein collaborator—in which the forces of the Revolution must contend with samurai saboteurs, counterrevolutionary kulaks, and rabble-rousing “Old Believer” Christians, pushing Soviet civilization into the wilds of the Pacific coast. Part spy thriller, part full-throated agitprop, part pantheistic bliss-out, and pure Dovzhenko.

35mm print courtesy of the Filmoteka Narodowa, Warsaw

Distributor: Dovzhenko Center

Part of Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Earth and Empire