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Wigwam (Shining Ray) The Bridge Breakers Rain We Are Building Philips Radio Creosote Komsomol (Song of Heroes) New Earth Borinage The Spanish Earth The 400 Million Power and the Land Indonesia Calling The First Years Song of the Rivers The Seine Meets Paris Before Spring Italy Is Not a Poor Country Travel Notebook A Valparaiso The Mistral Pour le Mistral Far from Vietnam The 17th Parallel How Yukong Moved the Mountains A Tale of the Wind Magnitogorsk, Forging the New Man		The First Years Pierwse Lata 1949 / Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Poland / B&W / 99 min / 35mm Director: Joris Ivens Script: Marion Michelle Camera: Ivan Fric, Zachari Shandov, Wladislaw Forbert, et. al Editors: Joris Ivens, Karel Hoeschl Music: Jan Kapr Commentary: Karel Hoeschl (Czech version), Catherine Duncan (English version); spoken by Stanley Harrison Producer: Jaroslav Jilovec Production company: Statni Film, Prague; Witwornia Filmow, Dokumentalnych, Warsaw; Bulgar Film, Sofia Originally intended as a four-part film on the new democracies in Eastern Europe: Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, and Poland. Since Tito went in a direction not sanctioned by the Soviet authorities, the section devoted to Yugoslavia was dropped. The First Years is a film on the construction of three socialist states after World War II. In the Bulgarian section, irrigation works are shown to make the people less dependent on the whims of nature. A Czech citizen tells us about Jan Hus and Czech nationalism and the institution of a new social and economic order after the war. In the Polish episode we follow a woman who leaves a devastated Warsaw to build a new existence in the west of Poland by working in a steel factory. All three episodes breathe the optimism of the socialist promise and sketch the road of transformation from a pre-war capitalist society into a new socialist democracy. A TOPICS A Bird's Eye View of a Documentary Career HELEN VAN DONGEN Kees Bakker beforenext COPYRIGHT:Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival Organizing Committee