Timid old woman Pelageya Nilovna observes the revolutionary activities of her son Pavel Vlasov and gradually comes to realize that his cause is a great and noble one. She involves herself in the movement and finds joy and great courage in her new life as a revolutionary. Based on Gorky's novel, filmed in the silent era by Pudovkin.

Second entry in Ukrainian director Mark Donskoy's "Maxim Gorki" trilogy. Picking up where 1938's My Childhood left off, the story covers the years in Gorki's life when the future writer (Alexei Lyarsky) was on his own, looking for a purpose and place in life.

Also known as At Great Cost, this adaptation of a story by Mikhailo Kotsyubinsky—a Ukrainian writer executed in the Stalinist purges but rehabilitated in 1955—anticipates the wave of Sixties poetic cinema in its focus on star-crossed lovers and its celebration of nature. Set in the 1930s, the film begins as Solomia is forced into an arranged marriage. She escapes with her lover, Ostep, and for a while it looks as if the fugitives will make a clean getaway. Yet eventually they come to the attention of the police, who mistake them for being part of a gang of thieves. One of the major figures of the earlier current of socialist realism, Donskoy, in one of his first post-Stalin era productions, here loosens his style to reveal a delicate romanticism rarely felt in his earlier films.

Во время Великой Отечественной войны простая украинская женщина Олёна Костюк становится партизанкой. Попав в руки врага, она перенесла нечеловеческие муки, пытки, смерть своего новорожденного ребёнка, убитого фашистом, но не выдала товарищей.