A demobilized soldier returns to Kiev during a celebration of Ukrainian freedom in 1918. He soon challenges the authorities by urging workers of the Arsenal, an ammunition factory, to support the Bolsheviks against Ukrainian Nationalists and fight for the Revolution after the overthrow of the Czar.

Aleksandr Dovzhenko alongside his other Russian contemporaries changed film editing forever with their Soviet montage theory, and in Arsenal you can see this theory practiced in full force. With electrifying editing Arsenal animates the horrors of World War I from a Ukrainian perspective.