Directed by Oleksandr Dovzhenko • 1930 • USSR/Ukraine

Widely regarded as Dovzhenko’s masterpiece and one of the finest silent films ever made, Earth is fiercely poetic and politically radical. Narrating the collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukrainian countryside, Dovzhenko employs avant-gar...

Directed by Lev Kuleshov • 1924 • USSR/Russia

John West, a YMCA president from Ohio, goes to Russia on official business, accompanied by his cowboy bodyguard, Jeddie. Nothing goes right from the start: Mr West’s suitcase goes missing, he and Jeddie get separated, and the hapless protagonist is k...

Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov • 1930 • USSR/Georgia

The directorial debut of Mikhail Kalatozov – who would go on to electrify Soviet cinema with his Palme d’Or-winning The Cranes are Flying – Salt for Svanetia is a groundbreaking work of radical ethnographic documentary. Capturing the lives of t...

Directed by Sergei Eisenstein • 1926 • USSR/Russia

A founding masterpiece of silent cinema, studied the world over for its radical montage techniques and still shocking today, Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin was originally conceived as part of a cycle of films commemorating the revolutio...

Directed by Dziga Vertov • 1931 • USSR/Ukraine

A radical early sound film from the grandfather of non-fiction, Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm captures Ukraine’s Donbas in the throes of revolutionary transformation. Vertov’s vision of industrialisation in motion verges on abstract reverie, taking the ...

Directed by Kote Mikaberidze • 1929 • USSR/Georgia

This explosive, wildly inventive, and criminally under-seen gem from Kote Mikaberidze burst out of Georgia in 1929. An absurdist satire of bureaucracy, the film follows the hapless Georgiy and his struggle to overcome a cruel administrative syst...