By the Bluest of Seas

Two sailors wash up on an island in the Caspian, stay with the fishing collective that pulls them out, and both fall for Masha, who runs the boats and loves someone else, in the Pacific fleet. A storm, a boat that comes back without her, and a wake that turns into a homecoming. Boris Barnet shoots the sea and the sun as if the collective farm were a place people might want to live, and the film runs on jokes, songs and weather rather than plan. The happiest film of the Soviet thirties. Yelena Kuzmina, Lev Sverdlin, Nikolai Kryuchkov. Mezhrabpomfilm and Azerfilm, 1936, sixty-nine minutes.