The Steel Road

The documentary is about the building of the Turkestan-Siberia railway, a line running northeast from Tashkent through Almaty to Novosibirsk. Viktor Turin divided it into five parts and gave the first to what water means for Turkestan, setting cracked ground beside snowmelt in the mountains and streams coming down into the valleys. The camera takes both the enthusiasm of the men building it and the astonishment of desert dwellers seeing a train move along rails laid across sand for the first time. This has to be said: the film is also a work of propaganda, presenting progress as a victory of the Soviet order over nature, and it mostly frames the local people as spectators of that victory. John Grierson, one of the central figures of documentary cinema, prepared the English version.