The film was shot as a chronicle of one day from the life of a big city, recorded with a camera “cine eye”. The idea for the film belongs to Mіkhail Kaufman, the cameraman and the director’s brother, who suggested that Vertov should create a “cameraman’s diary”. The camera of the talented cameraman Mikhail Kaufman captures a motley life of the Ukrainian megalopolises – Odesa, Kharkiv, and Kyiv – under New Economic Policy. This film turned out to be the last joint project of the talented creative tandem.

Vertov formulated his own creative intention for the film as follows, “This experimental work is aimed at creating a true international absolute film language based on its complete separation from the language of the theatre and literature.

Dziga Vertov (1896–1954) was one of the most prominent Russian and Ukrainian 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. In 1927, Vertov was fired from Sovkino for – as publicly stated – failing to submit the script for the Man with a Movie Camera on time. 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).