“Nebuvalyi Pokhid” is a miraculously saved but absolutely forgotten Mikhail Kaufman’s avant-garde masterpiece. Over 80 years the film has been stored on the shelves of one of the Ukrainian archives, labeled as a usual newsreel. It was only in 2015 that Kaufman’s avant-garde experiment was bought back and restored by the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Centre.

It is a constructivist film reporting about the movement of the “twenty-five-thousanders” -- workers who in 1929 were sent by the Communist Party to improve the performance of the villages. It was filmed in one of the kolhoz-es (collective farms) of the time - Giant, at the Kharkiv Tractor Plant and the Black Sea Fleet in Sevastopol. It is a surprising film showing the rural area of the time in a way which was customary for representing urban areas. Despite its propaganda format, the film combines Vertov’s industrial admiration and Dovzhenko’s pantheistic softness. Kaufman contrasts the geometric rhythm of the mechanized factories with the rural softness in the film. Collectivization and industrialization are close together in the film. The creative paths of Mikhail Kaufman and Dziga Vertov diverged after “A Man With A Movie Camera”, 1929. Using some of the footage Mikhail made his own film “In Spring”, and later -- “Nebuvalyi Pokhid”. This great and tragic documentary is one of the last vertices of the Ukrainian avant-garde cinema of the 1920s.
For more information or for tickets, visit: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/igMxAl-E9XIovpJQnG0JmQ