235 000 000 (1967)

Released under the title 235 000 000 Faces, this remarkable film came out in 1967, the year that marked the 50th anniversary of the October Revolution and the founding of the Soviet Union. The number 235 million refers to the 1966 population of the USSR, then the largest country in the world. The film’s unseen ambition was to create a collective portrait of all the citizens of this vast empire, and the project was the result of collaboration among a new generation of young talent at the Riga Film Studio. Although Dziga Vertov’s A Sixth Part of the World (1926) was an early Soviet precedent with a similar subject and approach, Latvian filmmakers had never attempted a film with a shooting process on this scale.