Wikipedia:Today's featured article/March 22, 2009

Bezhin Meadow is a 1937 Soviet film, directed by Sergei Eisenstein, which is renowned for having been suppressed and believed destroyed before its completion. It tells the story of a young farm boy whose father attempts to betray the government for political reasons by sabotaging the year's harvest, and of the son's efforts to stop his own father to protect the Soviet state, and culminates in the boy's murder and a social uprising. The film draws its title from a story by Ivan Turgenev, but is based on the life of Pavlik Morozov, a young Russian boy who became a political martyr following his death in 1932 after he denounced his father to Soviet government authorities and subsequently died at the hands of his family. Commissioned by a Communist youth group, the film's production ran from 1935 to 1937, when it was halted by the central Soviet government for alleged artistic, social, and political failures in the film's content. Some, however, blamed the failure of Bezhin Meadow on government interference and policies extending all the way to Joseph Stalin himself. Bezhin Meadow was long thought lost in the wake of World War II bombings. In the 1960s, however, cuttings and partial prints of the film were found; and from these, a reconstruction of Bezhin Meadow, based on the original script, was undertaken. (more...)

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