Air City / Aerohrad

This feature film is set in the 1930s. In the Soviet Far East, near the Pacific Ocean, a new utopian city called Air City is planned to be built. The local population is divided into two groups: one supports the project, while the other (the “social class enemies”) opposes it in every way. To sabotage the construction, Japan sends in saboteurs (‘samurai’). A collective farm employee, Stepan Hlushak (played by Stepan Shahaida), stands in their way. Part of the action takes place in a village of Old Believers, whose leaders have a negative attitude towards the Air City project (supporting the Japanese agents), while the youth, on the contrary, welcome it. At the end of the film, Stepan Hlushak sentences his old friend to death in a mod-justice court, who in his mind became a traitor, and then kills him.

The film also features the canonical “new Soviet man,” embodied by the pilot Volodymyr, played by Sergei Stoliarov. Seeing him in this role, Grigory Alexandrov immediately cast the actor without auditions for a role in the legendary film Circus (1936). Thanks to this, Stoliarov also became one of the prototypes for the worker in Viera Mukhina’s famous sculptural composition Worker and Kolkhoz Woman (1937).

Inspired by the Far Eastern nature, Dovzhenko worked on Air City in his old poetic manner, known from the times of Zvenyhora and Earth. Soviet critics highly praised the film, but it was too closely tied to Stalinist propaganda to enter the national canon after 1991. Despite its overtly avant-garde aesthetics, it remains one of the most underrated parts of Dovzhenko’s later legacy.