The plot of the 1947 film "New Home" is built around a disputed plot of land, Zarechnye Dubki, which a former partisan, chairwoman of the "Young Guard" collective farm, wants to sow, while an old partisan, chairman of the "Forward" collective farm, wants

The plot of the 1947 film "New Home" is built around a disputed plot of land, Zarechnye Dubki, which a former partisan, chairwoman of the "Young Guard" collective farm, wants to sow, while an old partisan, chairman of the "Forward" collective farm, wants to build over with houses for his collective farmers. The front-line veteran Ivan Veshnyak intervenes in the quarrel and succeeds in reconciling the old chairman with the "she-beast" of the Young Guard. The matter is settled by love and friendship, and Belarusian soil acquires a new brick village and new brick works; the fields are cleared, the grain is fine, and the people are happy. When collective farmers act in a neighbourly and Soviet fashion, everything at once falls into place. The harvest is over, and now there is nothing left to do but play weddings.

In one scene, at the grubbing-up of stumps, the sapper company's sergeant-major, played by the handsome Leonid Kmit, has this line: "After all, we sappers are the first builders. The soldiers tread on the Germans' tails, and we are there in a trice: put up a bridge, a puff and a spit, a wave of the little axe, and there you are, sir, a house. And what, may I ask, is a house? In a house a man first and foremost starts a family. And the family is the foundation of the state. So it turns out that the sapper is a state builder."

The words are fine, and perhaps, it may seem, rather too lofty. But how true the notion is that the foundation of the state is the family. It is vexing that in our day there is no such formula even in propaganda cinema, and the state simply fails to cope with caring for the family.