Legendary Soviet director Mikhail Romm (1901–1971), one of the greatest teachers in the USSR of luminaries such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Vasily Shukshin and Andrei Konchalovsky, devoted the last decade of his life to documentary filmmaking, starting with the 1965 Ordinary Fascism, an enduring anti-Nazi statement, and ending with a documentary originally called World '68, later retitled The World of Today. Romm’s film was conceived as an impassioned, large-scale essay on the origins of the 20th century and the subsequent reality the disappointed director felt slipping away from him. The film itself slipped away from him and was left unfinished at the time of his death. His younger colleagues, Marlen Khutsiev, Elem Klimov and German Lavrov, completed the film from the elements he left behind in addition to segments from Ordinary Fascism, closing the film with Romm’s ultimately optimistic outlook: "And still I believe that man is sensible..."