Dream

Jewish director Mikhoel Romm was one of Russia's top film directors whose distinguished career was rewarded with five Stalin prizes. He directed the first films about Lenin which are now considered classics of Soviet cinema. Even within the restraints of the Stalinist period he was able to loosen some of the chains of ideological orthodoxy. His films most acclaimed in the West were made in the post-Stalin era. They included NINE DAYS OF ONE YEAR (1962), which depicts the moral problems faced by young Soviet physicists who are working on military applications of nuclear energy; and ORDINARY FASCISM (1966), an inquiry into the psychology of fascism. DREAM, made early in Romm's career, is the story of a Jewish family living in eastern Poland at the time of its annexation to the USSR in 1939. It pokes fun at the naiveté and moral decay of bourgeois Polish society, yet subtly satirizes those who dream of a better life under the Soviet system.