ROAD TO LIFE
1931, Nikolai Ekk, Drama
Release: 1931
Runtime: 98 min
Country: Soviet Union
Genre: Drama
Language: Russian w/English subtitles
Cast: Nikolai Batalov, Yvan Kyrlya, Mikhail Dzhagofarov, Mikhail Zharov
Crew:
Screenwriter: Nikolai Ekk, Anton Makarenko, Osip Brik
Cinematographer: Vasili Pronin
Music: Yakov Stollyar
Musical Score: Jacob Stoliar
Sound: Yevgeni Nesterov
Production company: Mezhrabpom Films
ROAD TO LIFE, the 1931 landmark Soviet film by acclaimed director Nikolai Ekk and first Soviet sound film ever produced, is now available in a new 4K restoration. Acclaimed film historian Jay Leyda writes of the film: “Road To Life keeps a high place in Soviet film history, for its fusion of technical, dramatic and political achievements.” After first premiering in the USA at the Filmarte Theater in Los Angeles and the Cameo Theater in New York City in January of 1932, the film went on to achieve critical success and claim its place in the halls of Essential Cinema.
In the years following the Revolutions, Soviet society faced a growing problem: “Wild Boys”: roving bands of homeless children who had lost their parents after a long period of civil war and famine. One particular group of Wild Boys, led by Mustapha (Yvan Kyrlya), infamous for being captured countless times only to cleverly escape over and over, finds itself incarcerated following a raid on their hideout. The authorities want to jail the young miscreants, but an idealistic comrade, Sergeyev, (Nikolai Batalov) objects and convinces the rest to allow an experiment to take place: enroll the wild children in a labor commune where they will learn a trade and work, as an alternative to prison, to reform them into productive, law-abiding citizens. All seems to go according to plan at first, but Sergeyev soon realizes the true challenge of breaking the Wild Boys of their old ways.
ROAD TO LIFE is based on true events that constituted a major societal problem in Soviet culture preceding the film’s production.
Film Reference
By Robert Dunbar
“One of the first Soviet sound films—with an imaginative sound track far ahead of its time—Nikolai Ekk’s Road to Life was a smash hit both in Russia and in the West, where its impact generated some dozen spin-offs on its theme of “difficult” children.”
Close Up
By Andor Kraszna-Krausz
“Ekk’s story of The Way into Life of the Besprisonis (i.e., the uncared-for children), shown in the hands of a new, free art of education, acquaints us with a very impressive, typical part of Soviet work.”
National Board of Review Magazine
By Harry Alan Potamkin, February 1932
“This, remember, is the first Soviet talkie; Potemkin was not the first Soviet film. And yet Road to Life is for the talkie what Potemkin was, in part, for the mute film — the fulfillment of a first period”
Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, 1960
by Jay Leyda
“There are passages in Road To Life so filmically satisfying that Ekk’s later retreat into novelties seems a great pity.”
Soviet Cinema, 1976
by Alexander S. Birkos
“One of the best films of Soviet cinema.”
National Board of Review Magazine, 1932
by Harry Alan Potamkin
“This film, the first directed by a young man, N. Ekk, is evidence of several conditions in the Soviet film, and in the Soviet society. Having treated the general canvasses of the revolution and the reconstruction, the new study is the detail, the intensive experience, the intimate and humane. Maturity permits the treatment of individuality as the focus of the social composition, individuality but not hero-worship. It permits the full story, the losses that add up to victory. In such a picture there will be no oratory, no fetish of the immense or grand technique — that is the first articulation in a new environment, social or cinematic. The instruments will be as one with the idea, the narrative experience. That is what has happened in Road to Life, so that the too simple-eyed critics could not see the mastery of the technique, educated, to be sure, by earlier directors like Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Dovzhenko.”