Recommendations from the Kyiv Independent: ‘Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas’ (Patreon)

Dear Kyiv Independent members, 

This is Jason Blevins, the creative video director at the Kyiv Independent. I want to share with you a film I recently discovered, “Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas.” It was filmed in the Donbas in 1929 to promote Stalin’s first five-year plan. Its director, Dziga Vertov, is known to many filmmakers for his prior silent film, “Man with a Movie Camera,” which captured the daily lives of those in Moscow, Kyiv, and Odesa. That film was the first film screened in my film school as an example of purely cinematic storytelling through camera and editing. It had no intertitles to communicate dialogue. It was pure cinema.

“Enthusiasm” would be Vertov’s first sound film, but it is no less experimental than “Man with a Movie Camera.” The film juxtaposes the anti-religious and propaganda campaigns of the new Soviet government with the grueling coal industry of Ukraine’s Donbas region.

What makes the film particularly interesting in 2025 is the appearance of the Ukrainian language throughout — on banners, on propaganda posters, and on architecture. Russia has repeatedly claimed this region is ethnically Russian and that the “Kyiv junta” installed after the “2014 coup” discriminated against the local Russian-speaking population. 

However, what we can see here in this film is a Ukrainian Donbas, nearly 100 years ago. Yes, Russian is spoken in the film, it was the colonizer’s language — like English in India or Spanish in Mexico. The Russian Empire had repeatedly repressed the Ukrainian language over multiple centuries, and Stalin would continue this trend within the Soviet empire, too. But briefly in the 1920s, Ukrainization policies allowed Ukraine more freedom to develop its own cultural identity.  

There is a rich legacy of Ukrainian cinema from this era that has been misappropriated as “Russian cinema” by many film scholars. Ukraine’s contribution to the cinematic language has often been erased or overlooked. But why is this important? To me, if you remove the complexity of their identities, you lose sense of how they saw and experienced the world — which was then translated into their art. 

It was in Ukraine, not Russia, that Dziga Vertov created his most notable creative endeavors, such as “The Eleventh Year,” alongside his brother Mikhail Kaufman who created the experimental documentary “In Spring” and who served as cinematographer on “Man with a Movie Camera.” Same for Oleksandr Dovzhenko (who created documentaries like “Earth” and “Arsenal”), whose latter works in Russia were less inspired and suffered greater censorship than his works in Ukraine. 

Vertov was in particular interested in establishing cinema as its own artform, removed from literary or theatrical traditions. Along with his contemporaries, like Dovzhenko, you can see the influence of Vertov in the works of filmmakers like Terrence Malick (“Days of Heaven,” “The Tree of Life”), Christopher Nolan (“Oppenheimer,” “The Dark Knight”), Chloe Zhao (“Nomadland”), Alejandro Inarritu (“The Revenant,” “Birdman”), Jean-Luc Goddard (“Breathless”), and Martin Scorsese (“Goodfellas,” “Taxi Driver”). 

You can find “Enthusiasm: The Symphony of Donbas” here on YouTube for free. Included below are stills from the film.