Mark Donskoy

An adaptation of a story by a Ukrainian writer Mykhailo Kotsiubynsky 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.

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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.

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The inhabitants of Chukotka are shown to be cruelly exploited before the revolution. Once Chukotka is visited by the representative of the Kamchatka Revolutionary Committee, Los, and the ethnographer Zhukov. The news of the arrival of the Russians immediately disperses along the coast. Contrary to the pressure of the American Thomson and the local "oligarch" Alitet in Chukotka, fair trade laws are established, as a result of which the Americans and Alitet leave Chukotka.

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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.

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A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kyiv. 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.

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The German conquerors are above nothing, not even the slaughter of small children, to break the spirit of their Soviet captives. Suffering more than most is Olena, a Soviet partisan who returns to the village to bear her child, only to endure the cruelest of arbitrary tortures at the hands of the Nazis.

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This literary adaptation was one of only two films made during World War II on the subject of the Civil War following the Bolshevik Revolution, as attention by filmmakers and viewers shifted away from past history and toward the current conflict.

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Fighting Film Collection No. 9 (Boyevoy kinosbornik No. 9) is the ninth issue of Boyevoy kinosbornik series, released in May 1942. It contains three segments: "Kvartal No.14/Block 14" (Savchenko), "Siniye skaly/The Blue Cliff" (or "Blue Crags") (Braun) and "Mayak/The Signal" (or "Beacon") (Donskoy).

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

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My Universities is the last installment of Russian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Having endured a painful youth in My Childhood and a torturous sojourn as a serf in My Apprenticeship, future writer Gorki reaches maturity with an insatiable desire for personal and artistic freedom. Gorky goes to work in the shipyards and commisserates with the hard-drinking, philosophical dockworkers.

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Picking up where 1938's My Childhood left off, the story covers the years in Gorki's life when the future writer was on his own, looking for a purpose and place in life.

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Young Maxim grows up under the czarist regime with his grandparents as guardians. Continually demeaned by his martinet grandfather, Maxim is drawn to his warm-hearted grandmother, who instills in him the willingness to pursue his writing muse.

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

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Lost movie.

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Two country boys move to Moscow. One becomes a construction worker who dreams of being an inventor, the other becomes a decadent poet.

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