Fired from Sovkino studio after A Sixth Part of the World, Vertov
(and his brother-cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman and wife-assistant director Elizaveta Svilova) was soon hired by the All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration. The trio's first assignment was a documentary celebrating the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution – more or less the same kind of ode-inpictures as Stride, Soviet! and A Sixth Part of the World. But while the political theme of The Eleventh Year may be orthodox and plain, its photography and editing are daring and complex. In the eyes of a left-wing artist of the twenties, ten years of Socialism was a radical social experiment, and as such, deserved, nay, required to be presented in a radically experimental way.

Dovzhenko referred to Zvenigora as "unusually complicated in structure, eclectic in form… a catalogue of all my creative abilities." Anchored in a legendary tale of the search for buried treasure in Zvenigora mountain, the film proceeds to take in centuries of Ukrainian history and folklore through a series of unexpected jumps between time periods and stories. A visually exhilarating mixture of the mythical and the modern, it ultimately arrives (by train) at an ode to industrialization.