Description:

A fairy tale about the heavy bondage of the Belarus people under the Polish-Lithuanian yoke. Ivas, a farm laborer of the Polish lords, does wonderful affairs but receives no gratitude. The Red Army releases Ivas from bondage.

There was also a colour version of this film released in the same year, but Russia's state film archive no longer owns a copy.

The first video above was scanned to Betacam-SP from 35mm film by an unknown Russian film archive. In 2024, that Betacam-SP was scanned by the Vidachestvo film preservation project. The audio of that version was quite out of sync after 13:36, so some extensive audio restoration work had to be done by the admin of this site.

The first video is mssing the image from 2.5 minutes in the middle of the film, for which only the audio track has survived. Some descriptions in the English subtitles for what's going on based on the audio cues have been added. At the very end of the film, the audio cuts off too early, so we can't hear Ivas's final lines. This could be because that audio is lost, or it could be a mistake made by those at the film archive who scanned the film from 35mm to the Betacam-SP.

Previous versions of the film online (all of horrendous quality) had simply cut that whole section out - see the second video above.


Full list of audio edits/corrections made:

1st round:
19:22 -300ms
18:56 -800ms
18:32 +1300ms (ONLY Ivas's answer, nothing else - used march music from earlier in the song for the restoration)
18:28 -50ms
18:07 +350ms (copied + inserted empty static sound from just after that point)
17:57 -50ms
16:38 -450ms
13:36 -1100ms

2nd round:
16:45 -450ms
17:57 +450ms

3rd round:
16:44-17:57 +250ms