In the summer of 1914, a sleepy town in the province of Russia is woken up by news about WWI. Suddenly, your longtime neighbor and preferred checkers partner Robert turns out to be a “German” with whom you are no longer on speaking terms. Your daughter Man’ka was seen sitting on a street bench with Mueller, a German cobbler, now a POW, and it’s a scandal. A solitary proletarian internationalist shouts at the top of his voice, “Stop it! He is not a German, he is a cobbler!” to no avail. Ironically, this pacifist/internationalist—and, above all, irresistible—film was made in 1933, at the dawn of the Nazi rule in Germany and the high noon of Italian fascism, and was awarded a prize at the 1934 Venice Film Festival. Another irony, internal to film history, is that Outskirts is one of the first Soviet talkies heralding, unwittingly, the end of the silent era, the time when films easily communicated to people’s (and peoples’) hearts regardless of whether you spoke English, German or Russian.