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Adventures of Half a Rubel

Year

1929

Country

Ukrainian SSR

Studio

Kyiv Film Factory VUFKU

Timing

69 min

The film is based on children’s stories Fedko a Tearaway and The Grandma`s Present by V. Vynnychenko. The script was written by Mykola Bazhan, a Futurist poet, translator and editor of the magazine Kino.

Children from working class neighbourhoods wearing patched-up clothes have fun in Kyiv streets – they slide down showy slopes, walk on the brink of a precipice and even conquer the light ice of the Dninpto river. They can see, how rich people live, only through a gap in the fence. The boy Fedko who is called “a tearaway” because of his naughty and disobedient character comes up with some risky entertainment, and adults often punish him for this while his friends do respect him.

This is one of a few VUFKU children’s films which survived. It exacerbates the problem of inequality of different social classes, which, though in a less extent, is present in the film’s source – short stories of Volodymyr Vynnychenko, a famous writer and politician of that time.

The Kino magazine calls this film “a rare example of thrift” as it was mostly filmed on location, and only the fifth part of it was filmed in the studio. This insures that one can see the shots of Kyiv in the spring of 1928, which due to their lyricism and focus on natural phenomena remind the Kinok Mikhail Kaufman’s film In Spring which was made almost at the same time.

Category

Subtitles

Director

Aksel Lundin

Operator

Yan Kraievskyi

In roles

Kolia Kopelian, D. Liubchenko / Ivan Kononenko-Kozelskyi, S. Liubchenko / D. Orlova, Ivan Sahatovskyi, K. Krot(k)evych, Mykhailo Orlov, Petia Kuryshkin, Andriusha Pashkevych, Lukianov.

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