Venyamin Zuskin

Venyamin Zuskin

1899-04-28
53 (1952-08-12)

N/A

Most Known for...

Movie Picture

Seekers of Happiness 1936 (5.7)

During the 1920s, many impoverished Jews searching for a better life made their way to Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region on the Chinese border. This melodrama tells the story of a Jewish family's immigration to Birobidzhan and their experiences as settlers on a collective farm in the area.
Movie Picture

The Taras Family 1945 (6.1)

Russian filmmaker Mark Donskoi, of "The Gorky Trilogy" fame, was responsible for the postwar Soviet drama The Taras Family (originally Nepokorenniye, and also released as Unvanquished and Unconquered). A semi-sequel to Donskoi's Raduga (1944), the story is set in Nazi-occupied Kiev. The drama focusses on the travails of a typical Soviet family and on the efforts by the Germans to force the reopening of a local munitions factory. The film is at its most grimly effective in a long sequence wherein the Nazis conduct a search for Jewish escapees, culminating in a horribly graphic re-creation of the slaughter of the Jews at Babi Yar. While Donskoi was critically lambasted for his cinematic "sloppyiness" during this sequence (hand-held camera, rapid cuts etc.), it can now be seen that he was attempting a realistic, documentarylike interpretation of this infamous Nazi atrocity.
Movie Picture

Frontier 1935

The residents of the village of Staroje Dudino, located four kilometers west of the Soviet border, are completely dependent on the wealthy Novik, whose interests are protected by the local police and clergy. Novik is actively stirring up ethnic strife between the Jewish poor and Polish workers. During the traditional "black crown" ceremony (a wedding ceremony for an old man and an old woman), a group of factory workers led by the communist Haidul, together with the Jewish poor, attack the police and free Boris Bernstein, who had been sentenced to death.
Venyamin Zuskin

Venyamin Zuskin

N/A

N/A

Most Known for...

Movie Picture

Balancing Acts: A Jewish Theatre in The Soviet Union 2008

Moscow, January 1948. In the bitter cold, a large crowd attends the State Funeral of the Yiddish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels. An official proclamation mourns the death of "a great People's Artist of the Soviet Union." What people are really mourning is the death of the most popular Jewish theater in the Soviet Union, and the man who kept it alive against all odds for over 20 years. No doubt many suspected the truth: he had just been assassinated by Stalin's secret police.
Movie Picture

The Great Concert of Nations, or The Breath of Cheyne-Stokes 1991

A film about the destruction of the Jewish intelligentsia - from the defeat of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee to the “Doctors’ Plot.”