Yuliya Solntseva - Zacharovannaya Desna AKA The Enchanted Desna (1964)

Jonathan Rosenbaum's comments on first seeing the film:
May 26, 1972: A screening of Julia Solntseva’s THE ENCHANTED DESNA (1964) at the Cinémathèque. Here is another Russian masterpiece that, like ENTHUSIASM, rarely gets shown, is ignored in most film literature, and on first glance seems to outdistance nearly all the “official” Russian classics.First glances are often deceptive; but how can we verify them when the films remain so difficult to see, and are so seldom spoken about? Indeed, if it hadn’t been for Godard’s enthusiastic reference to DESNA in a 1965 interview, I might never have gone. But surely it is one of the most ravishing spectacles ever made, an ecstatic riot of color and sound that uses 70mm and stereophonic recording with all the freedom and imagination of an inspired home movie.

Yuliya Solntseva - Povest plamennykh let aka The Story of the Flaming Years (1961)

Synopsis
The war is over. Soviet troops are marching past the captured Reichstag (former seat of government) in Berlin. A young soldier with a submachine gun in hand, a Ukrainian peasant from the Dnipro region, Ivan Orliuk pauses, towering by the Brandenburg Gates. He stands like a magnificent monument. Before the war, Orliuk’s was the most peaceful of occupations—he tilled the soil. With the war, he took to arms to cover a difficult road from the Dnipro all the way to Berlin.