Outskirts

A small town in the Russian provinces. The workers in a shoe workshop, the shop's owner and the young people of the town are going about their daily lives when the First World War begins. The young men go to the front. German prisoners are brought to the town and one of them grows close to a local girl. At the front and in the town the same question grows: is the man opposite you an enemy, or a worker like yourself? Boris Barnet's film is one of the first sound productions of Soviet cinema and uses sound as something new: noises take the place of music and silence is a deliberate instrument. The genre is strangely mixed too; broad comedy, the horror of war and melodrama stand side by side in the same film. The story makes a hero of nobody and shows the enemy side as human as well. Today it is counted as Barnet's most original work, and it runs ninety-one minutes.