Bilokin Ivan Franko as Arkhyp Bilokin Volodymyr Mikhajlov as priest Pavlo Petrik as Communist Party cell leader O. Umanets as peasant Ye. Bondina as peasant girl as young kulak Production Dovzhenko wrote, produced, and filmed Earth in 1929, during the process of collectivization in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which he described as "a period … of economic [and] mental transformation of the whole people." Collectivization began in 1929 as Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin sought to control agriculture in the Soviet Union as it industrialized. This meant the collectivization of privately-owned farms, which peasants resisted by killing their draft animals, sabotaging agricultural machinery, and assassinating Soviet agents. Much of Earths script was inspired by Dovzhenko's experience of this process; Vasyl's death was based on the assassination of a Soviet agent in his home district. Dovzhenko also drew inspiration from his childhood memories, for instance basing the character of Semyon on his own grandfather. Production of Earth began on 24 May 1929 and was finished on 25 February 1930. The original soundtrack was composed by Levko Revutsky. Cinematography Filming mostly took place in the Poltava Oblast of Ukraine. To shoot the film, Dovzhenko partnered with the Ukrainian cinematographer , who also shot two of Dovzhenko's previous films, Zvenigora and Arsenal. Close-ups are used extensively to highlight one or several characters, usually unnamed peasants, frequently motionless. Film scholar Gilberto Perez likened Earths cinematography to Homer's Odyssey, as "all that counts, in a given moment, is what is … clearly displayed on the screen". Vasyl's dance celebrating the success of the harvest was originally scripted as a Cossack-style hopak but Svashenko altered it after consulting local Ukrainian farmers. Release Earth was released on 8 April 1930 and was banned by Soviet authorities nine days later. Before the film was approved for general distribution, certain scenes criticized as giving the film a "biological" focus, such as the peasants urinating into the tractor's radiator, were removed. The original negative for the film was destroyed in 1941 by a German air raid during the First Battle of Kyiv. In 1952, Dovzhenko adapted the film into a novelization. In 2012, the National Oleksandr Dovzhenko Film Center, the Ukrainian state film archive, restored Earth and gave it a new score by the Ukrainian folk quartet DakhaBrakha. This version of the film premiered at the 2012 Odesa International Film Festival. Reception Earths reception in the Soviet Union consisted