Arrest Warrant

The Whites enter the city, and they come over to Nadiia for search and seizure. They do not find the package, but they arrest Nadiia. A White counterintelligence officer interrogates her at the house-headquarters for a long time. However, Nadiia is silent and keeps the location of the package in secret, even though they blackmail her and threat her son, her husband and even her common sense. 

Warrant Order was made by Heorhii Tasin, a manager of Yalta and Odesa Film Studios, a great admirer of German expressionism and director of the first Soviet “Eastern” Alim about the life and struggle of the Crimean Tatars. The film was made in cooperation with the German cameraman Albert Kuhn and the famous Crimean Tatar theatre actor, the first People’s Artist of the Crimean Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic Hayri Emir-zade. 

Inspired by the life drama of the anti-imperialism revolutionary Yegor Sazonov, Warrant Order is the first Ukrainian Soviet film focused on the topic of traditional silencing of women. 

Nadiia is forced to speak, however, it is the habit of silencing that helps her to resist the rational world of men and the war. Nadiia Karahalska’s interrogation actually turns into the Soviet analogue of the trial from The Passion of Joan of Arc which will be filmed by Carl Theodor Dreyer in two years after Tasin’ film. 

Therefore, despite its entertaining aura of espionage, mental torture, and the romance of revolutionary committees, Warrant Order is also a reflection on the role of women in the historical / hysterical processes of the civil wars.

The film was released on 14 February 1928 in Moscow.