Earth

Alexander Dovzhenko's Earth (Земля / Zemlya) opened in 1930 and is widely considered the masterpiece of the Ukrainian Soviet director's career. The film sits permanently in the upper tier of every Sight & Sound poll. Dovzhenko, alongside Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, is one of the foundational Soviet montage filmmakers of the silent era, but Earth operates in a register distinct from his Russian colleagues — slower, more pastoral, more attentive to the cycles of agricultural life.

The arrival of collectivisation and a tractor in a small Ukrainian village in the late 1920s — and the response of the older landowners and the younger collective-farm members. The film follows several generations of one peasant family across this transformation, in a sustained celebration of bodies, soil, sun, fruit, and the weather of the Ukrainian steppe. The central young Komsomol activist is played by Semyon Svashenko, the older grandfather by Stepan Shkurat.

Dovzhenko's editing — long static frames of faces, fruit and ploughs, intercut with sudden bursts of rapid montage — produced a sustained pastoral lyricism that has shaped the broader pastoral register in Russian-Ukrainian cinema, including Andrei Tarkovsky's later work. The film was officially supported as Soviet propaganda for collectivisation but is now widely received as a near-mystical celebration of Ukrainian peasant life that the propaganda framing largely fails to capture. The 2022 restoration is the standard contemporary version.