This is probably my favourite silent Soviet epic. This film was shot on location on Mongolia and it wasn’t well liked by the commissars because it was quite sympathetic to ethnic identity and cultural specificity. Pudovkin’s fable like film is about a poor villager who may be the heir of Genghis Khan and so a threat to the British colonizers(British censors objected and changed the titles to White Russians), their attempts to use and exploit our hero form much of the film’s plot.
STORM OVER ASIA is not about plot, it’s about the beauty of the landscape(the film was shot on location), it’s freedom and it’s independence. In the stunning finale, the earth rises and speaks for itself.