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Earth
1930, Київська кінофабрика ВУФКУ, 6 ч. / 1704 м., 79 хв.
It is a poetic film story about the events of collectivisation in Ukraine in the late 1920s, the creation of the first collective farms, class animosity…
Earth is the most famous Ukrainian film, recognised as a masterpiece of world cinema. Glorified in Ukraine after Dovzhenko’s death, the avant-garde film, banned 9 days after its release, gave rise to perhaps the largest number of controversial interpretations. Full of lyrical pantheism and, at the same time, utopian exaltation, it demonstrated the ambiguity of the Ukrainian civilizational choice of the 1920s, culminating in dramatic collectivisation.
Oleksandr Dovzhenko is, probably, the most prominent and yet controversial figure of the Ukrainian culture of the Soviet era. In his creative work, he developed a political and cultural project of Ukraine, far from dogmatic communism: this – conditionally avant-garde – project paradoxically combined futurism and traditionalism, utopianism and conservatism.
The ability to think mythologically, in a supertemporal manner, embracing entire historical eras and associating himself with his own people, makes Dovzhenko quite a heroic figure.
At the International Referendum in Brussels in 1958, the film was named one of the 12 most significant achievements of world cinema.
In 2012, Earth was restored to the order of The Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre. The new soundtrack for the film was created by the Ukrainian ethno-chaos band DakhaBrakha, whose music shifts Earth’s accents from the film’s ideological connotations to the universal humanistic ones.
The restored version of Earth with a new soundtrack was released at the Odesa IFF on July 21, 2012. Since then, the project has started travelling international film festivals: in October 2012, it was shown at the opening of the GOGOLFEST International Festival, in February 2013, it was screened within the framework of the Ukrainian reception during the Berlin IFF, in April, it appeared at the CPH PIX IFF in Copenhagen, in June, it was demonstrated at the 12th Transylvania International Film Festival.
Work on the film started on 24.05.1929, and ended on 25.02.1930. The film released on April 8, 1930, in Kyiv.
