Oleksandr Dovzhenko: Odeskiy Svytanok

1926, a young Ukrainian arrives in the port city of Odessa. Though little-known at the time, he was soon mentioned in the same breath as Eisenstein and widely regarded as a leading figure of Soviet revolutionary cinema. He's fascinated by the medium of film and German expressionism, not to mentioned American genre filmmaking, from Griffith to Chaplin. At the time Odessa was a pulsating city, home to an expanding film industry then regarded as the “Hollywood of the Black Sea”. Dovzhenko experiments with various genre forms from murder mystery and comedy to folklore. His suspense-packed drama ARSENAL (1928), based on the 1918 uprising of workers at the eponymous arms factory in Kiev against the Ukrainian Constituent Assembly, ensured him a place in film history.

Featuring diverse archive material, amusing reenactments and commentary from film historians, the result is an entertaining work on a period that saw Dovzhenko, not to mention Ukrainian film as a whole, in their heyday. WMH