Mezhrabpomfilm

The first Soviet sound film, Road to Life (1931), was made by Mezhrabpomfilm.

Mezhrabpomfilm, (Russian: Межрабпомфильм), was a German-Russian film studio active between 1928 and 1936. The studio was formed on the initiative of Willi Münzenberg, a leading German communist, as an expansion of Mezhrabpom-Rus (Russian: Межрабпом-Русь), a film studio created in 1924 by the German run Workers International Relief in the premises of the former private film studio Atelier Rus (active 1915-1920), and in close collaboration with the German film production and distribution company Prometheus-Film, which had been set up by of Workers International Relief in 1926.

Mezhrabpomfilm made close to 60 films, among them Soviet Union's first sound film, Nikolai Ekk's Road to Life (1931); Boris Barnet's The Thaw (1931), Outskirts (1933) and By the Bluest of Seas (1936); Aleksandr Andriyevsky's early science-fiction film Lost Sensation (1935); and Nikolai Ekk's Nightingale (1936), Soviet Union's first colour film. The company also produced Soviet Union's first animated films.

One of Mezhrabpomfilm's last films was Gustav von Wangenheim's Fighters (1936), about German workers fighting the Nazi Brownshirts and the SS in 1933. It was made by German filmmakers and actors who had fled to Moscow to avoid Hitler's terror. Ironically, many of them were later executed during Stalin's terror years.

In 1936, the company was dissolved, as it was regarded too independent and too influenced by foreigners. The facilities were taken over by Soyuzdetfilm ([Союздетфильм] Error: {{Lang-xx}}: text has italic markup (help)), the world's first film company devoted to films for children and teenagers, which in 1948 was renamed Gorky Film Studio.

1928 ad for the Prometheus production division

In Germany, Prometheus-Film produced films by Phil Jutzi, Leo Mittler's Beyond the Street (1929), and Slatan Dudow's Whither Germany (1932), as well as two joint productions with Mezhrabpomfilm, before going bankrupt in 1932,

Berlin's Bertz + Fischer published a book for a Retrospective - a programme of films which were presented at the 2012 Berlin Film Festival - in which German and Russian authors look at the studio and the aesthetics of the films produced there (Günter Agde, Alexander Schwarz (ed.): Die rote Traumfabrik: Meschrabpom-Film und Prometheus (1921–1936). Berlin: Bertz + Fischer 2012).

See also

• Gorky Film Studio

External links

• MUBI, 10 January 2012: Berlinale 2012. The Reds are coming to MoMA!