The Peasant Women of Ryazan

A village in the Russian countryside. Anna comes into the house she has married into as a bride; when her husband goes off to serve she is left alone in her father-in-law's house. In the same house there is also Vasilisa: lively, headstrong, openly against the old order of the village. The film follows the two paths side by side. Directed together by Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Ivan Pravov, the film belongs to the early period of Soviet cinema but is not a propaganda picture; there is almost no political message in it. The telling is about the lives of women in the village, the weight of the patriarchal order, and the different choices two women make in the face of it. It was shot in the Ryazan region itself. Preobrazhenskaya was one of the first women to direct in Soviet cinema.