Skobelev Committee

A man is increasingly unnerved by a mysterious portrait. Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, the film is thought to have run about 45 minutes long, but only an 8 minute fragment is known to have survived.

When a young girl finds a beautiful dead lily in the woods, she asks her grandfather to tell her about it. The lily stands in splendour beside a stream, admired by the creatures of the woods. But an army of beetles, bent on conquering new territories, wants to cross the stream - and the lily is blocking their way. An unashamed allegory of the German rape of Belgium.

The plot is the embodiment of everyday belief about the impact of a certain evil force on a person. The action develops in a peasant environment.

A worker and union leader is falsely accused of theft, by a boss who is lusting after his fiancée

The last surviving fiction film from Wladyslaw Starewicz's wartime associtation with the Skobelev Committee