The Romantics

Name: The Romantics
Director: Mark Donskoy
Genre: Adventure
Released: 1941
Duration: 1 h 9 min
Cast: Daniil Sagal, Vladimir Vladislavskiy, Dariga Tnalina, Irina Fedotova, Lev Sverdlin

1941 Adventure 69 minutes Directed by Mark Donskoy

About The Romantics

In the 1920s, during the campaign against illiteracy, the teacher Tatyana Petrovna travels far beyond the railway into the Chukotka tundra to open a school. The Chukchi do not trust a Russian woman, remembering the cheating of Russian traders. With Kuznetsov, head of the culture base, and Dr. Ivan Pavlovich, she visits the camps of hunters and reindeer herders. Under the local shaman, families will not send children to the school or even to the hospital when children are dying. She keeps at it. The children come to the first Soviet school in the tundra.

Cast & crew

More about The Romantics

Mark Donskoy directed. Tikhon Syomushkin and Fyodor Knorre wrote the script from Syomushkin's story "Chukotka." Bentsion Monastyrsky photographed it. Lev Shvarts wrote the music. Soyuzdetfilm produced it. The Russian title is Romantiki. It runs 69 minutes and was released on December 26, 1941.

Themes

a school where none had been
distrust left by traders
a shaman against the hospital
Chukotka
tundra
Tatyana Petrovna
literacy campaign
shaman
culture base
Soyuzdetfilm

Background

Released in December 1941, after the German invasion, the film looks back to the 1920s literacy campaign and treats a school in Chukotka as a Soviet achievement worth filming in wartime.

Making

The drama is a travel film and a lesson film at once: a graduate crosses the tundra, and the obstacle is a shaman who keeps sick children out of the doctor's tent.

Look

Bentsion Monastyrsky photographed the tundra camps and the new school.

Music

Lev Shvarts composed the score.

Notes

Irina Fedotova plays Tatyana Petrovna. Daniil Sagal plays Kuznetsov. Vladimir Vladislavsky plays Dr. Ivan Pavlovich.
The story is set in the literacy drive of the 1920s, not in the war year of the release.
Donskoy made it at Soyuzdetfilm, the studio for films aimed at younger audiences, between his better-known Gorky pictures.

Scenes

Tatyana arrives past the end of the railway and finds the camps unwilling to send her a single child.
Families influenced by the shaman refuse the hospital even while children are dying.
The children finally enter the school she has opened in the tundra.