Skobelev Committee

A man is increasingly unnerved by a mysterious portrait. Based on a story by Nikolai Gogol, the film is thought to have run about 45 minutes long, but only an 8 minute fragment is known to have survived.

When a young girl finds a beautiful dead lily in the woods, she asks her grandfather to tell her about it. The lily stands in splendour beside a stream, admired by the creatures of the woods. But an army of beetles, bent on conquering new territories, wants to cross the stream - and the lily is blocking their way. An unashamed allegory of the German rape of Belgium.

The plot is the embodiment of everyday belief about the impact of a certain evil force on a person. The action develops in a peasant environment.

The last surviving fiction film from Wladyslaw Starewicz's wartime associtation with the Skobelev Committee

One of the few known films shot in 1917 in Ukraine (UPR). The film contains portrait of the head of the General Secretariat - the first government of Ukraine, Volodymyr Vynnychenko, the head of the Ukrainian Central Rada, Professor Mykhailo Hrushevsky, with a group of members of the UCR near the Pedagogical Museum in Kyiv, where the Ukrainian Central Rada worked, and a group of delegates to the eighth session of the UCR.

A worker and union leader is falsely accused of theft, by a boss who is lusting after his fiancée