Soviet village drama where gossip destroys bloodlines — and nobody's hands are clean.
Returning to his native village at the end of his military service, Victor (Yuri Sarantsev) brought his bride into the house - and soon they got married. Victor works on the collective farm with great enthusiasm, he is appointed a foreman, but the happiness of old Danila, Victor’s father, is overshadowed by dirty gossip - as if Victor’s father is not he, but Shandybovich, whose unseemly deeds were recently exposed by Victor.
Acting
Skorobogatov's crumbling patriarch is devastating.
Direction
Shulman frames village life like a pressure cooker.
Director
Iosif Shulman
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Khrushchev Thaw cinema often used rural settings to critique Stalinist social control through collective scrutiny.
Shandybovich's name derives from 'shandor' — regional slang for troublemaker, making his villainy linguistically predetermined.
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