The Eleventh Year is the first of three avant-garde films made by Dziga Vertov and his brother, cameraman Mikhail Kaufman, in Ukraine on the basis of the newly opened VUFKU Kyiv Film Studio.

Dedicated to the success of the first five years in Donbas, the film tells the story of accelerated industrial modernisation of eastern Ukraine, which resulted in the transformation of an agricultural country into an industrial one. The film shows the most large-scale construction of its time – the construction of the Dniproges near Zaporizhzhia, the flooding of the ancient rapids of Kodatskyi, Nenasytets, Vilnyi and surrounding villages, the electrification of the Dnipro region (the village of Tyvrovo and the city of Kamianske), the operation of mines in Makiivka and other cities of Donbas, rallies in Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk (Dnipro) and Moscow.

Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) was one of the most prominent avant-garde film directors and a documentary film pioneer. In “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” the Kinoks call to replace the “visible staging of life phenomena” with real life, captured by an impersonal mechanical cine-eye. At the invitation of the Odesa Film Studio, he moved to Ukraine, where he made his pinnacle works The Eleventh Year (1928), Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas (1930).