Barbara the Fair with the Silken Hair

Tsar Yeremey sets out to travel his country and enter everything he owns into a ledger. On the way home he stops to drink from a well, and the king of the waters, Chudo-Yudo, seizes him and demands an unusual ransom: the thing that is in his own country but whose existence he does not know of. The tsar agrees, since he believes he has counted every blade of grass. But in his absence the tsarina has given birth to a son. Aleksandr Rou was the best known director of Soviet children's fairy tale films and worked for nearly thirty years out of the same treasury: Russian folk tales. This film comes from that tradition. Georgi Millyar played villains in Rou's films for years and is here too. The sets and costumes are close to theatre, the effects simple for their time. The story is built for children, but it also handles heavy subjects like a promise given in exchange, keeping one's word, and a debt owed by a father.