Earth

Alexander Dovzhenko's lyrical masterpiece — widely considered his greatest film and one of the supreme achievements of Soviet cinema. Set in a Ukrainian village during collectivization, the film tells the simple story of a young man's death and its aftermath, but Dovzhenko transforms it into a pantheistic hymn to the earth itself: sunflowers heavy with seed, apples ripening in moonlight, a young woman's naked grief, and the eternal cycle of birth, death, and renewal that connects the people to their land. The film was attacked by Soviet authorities for its insufficient political commitment and by Ukrainian nationalists for its treatment of collectivization, yet it endures precisely because it transcends politics entirely. A work of breathtaking visual beauty and profound, almost mystical feeling for the natural world.