Yevrei na zemle

Abram Room's "Yevrei na zemle" (Jews on the Land) is less a mere chronicle and more a visual manifesto, documenting the Soviet Union’s ambitious social engineering project: the establishment of Jewish collective farms in Crimea. The film meticulously, almost didactically, portrays the physical transformation of both land and people. We witness the arduous, collective labor involved in constructing new homes from the ground up, the vital task of digging wells to sustain life, and the systematic cultivation of virgin soil. This is not simply a record of agricultural development, but a deliberate depiction of a specific ideological vision, showcasing the integration of a traditionally urban population into a rural, collective, and fundamentally Soviet identity.