The Peasant Women of Ryazan

Olga Preobrazhenskaya, 1927, shot in a Ryazan village: two women, Anna and Vasilisa, under the same patriarchal roof, one broken by it, one walking out. War, a rape, a child, a Revolution that rearranges the furniture but not the grief. Co-directed with Ivan Pravov. It is the Soviet silent that treats the peasant household as a political unit, and Preobrazhenskaya as one of the few women who got to say so from behind the camera.