La Onzième Année

The Eleventh Year is a documentary based on a Soviet newsreel shot during the 1920s, telling the story of the construction of socialism. It is the first film filmed by Vertov in Ukraine. The eleventh year of Soviet rule was a period of industrialization, as well as the building of Dnipro HES and other giants of Soviet industry. The director intentionally focused on this non-anniversary year to avoid holiday shows and official government celebrations. The camera is focused only on the most important thing, which is work – the tireless construction of a new socialist reality in Ukraine. On February 28, 1928, Dziga Vertov said that The Eleventh Year was written directly by the movie camera, without the mediation of a script, and that the camera had replaced the writer’s pen. This allowed Vertov to claim that he had invented a pure cinematic language (deeply socialist at the same time), in which the camera deals directly with the raw material of the facts. The Eleventh Year was restored at the Oleksandr Dovzhenko National Centre at the end of 2012. (Артхаус Tрафік)