Storm Over Asia

Vsevolod Pudovkin's visually magnificent final silent film, set during the Russian Civil War in Mongolia. A young Mongol herdsman is cheated by a Western fur trader, joins the partisans, and is captured by the occupying British forces, who discover an amulet identifying him as a descendant of Genghis Khan. They install him as a puppet ruler — but the puppet has ideas of his own. Shot partly on location in the Mongolian steppe with breathtaking landscape photography, the film builds to one of the most extraordinary climaxes in all of silent cinema: a literal storm that seems to sweep away the old colonial order. Pudovkin's fusion of intimate character study, anti-imperialist politics, and sheer visual grandeur makes this one of the crowning achievements of Soviet montage cinema.