Fragment of an Empire

Fridrikh Ermler's remarkable late-silent film follows a shell-shocked World War I veteran who lost his memory during the conflict and wanders in a daze until, years later, his past suddenly comes flooding back. He returns to Petrograd — now Leningrad — and finds a world utterly transformed by revolution: his wife has remarried, his factory is now worker-run, and the entire social order he knew has been swept away. Ermler uses this Rip Van Winkle premise to examine the Soviet transformation with surprising nuance, capturing both the genuine progress and the disorienting strangeness of the new order through the bewildered eyes of a man unstuck in time. A deeply humane film that turns political upheaval into something personal and emotionally devastating.