Prometheus

If Oleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth was the first Ukrainian film to be attacked by the new Soviet censorship, Ivan Kavaleridze’s Prometheus was the last film that dared to experiment and use the avant-garde inventions of the 1920s. The peasant Ivan is conscripted into the Russian army and dispatched to the Caucasus. Inspired by their resistance, he returns home a revolutionary. Unique in its combination of Ukrainian and Caucasian landscapes, Prometheus courageously critiqued Russian chauvinism during the height of Stalinism. The result was not only a rupture in Kavaleridze’s career, but also the ultimate loss of autonomy for Ukrainian cinema in the interwar period.