Mother (1926)

Directed by Vsyevolod Pudovkin; script by Nikolai Zarkhi; camera by Anatoly Golovnya; movie poster by Grigory Borisov.

Although the film is based on Maxim Gorky’s novel Mother, the plot and the characters of the two heroes – Pelageya Vlasova and her son Pavel – stray from the book. The director depicts a downtrodden and backward mother who is unwittingly to blame for the arrest of Pavel – a revolutionary who knows where and how to find the road to the truth. The circumstances of life and the logics of reality, rather than a conscious understanding of politics, turn the mother into a revolutionary.

Vsyevolod Pudovkin (1893–1953) was the first Soviet director to show the revolution from the point of view of the human heart. The film brought Soviet cinema to international attention. Mother and The Battleship Potemkin were included in the list of the twelve greatest films ever made at an international film festival in Brussels in 1958.