Boxer-turned-actor Boris Barnet was only twenty-five when he directed his debut feature, The Girl with the Hatbox. A protégé of the legendary Soviet director and teacher Lev Kuleshov, Barnet specialized in gentle satires about the complications of workaday life in the era of the New Economic Policy. In The Girl with the Hatbox, Barnet utilized Moscow’s housing restrictions as a plot point to motivate a marriage between a peasant seamstress and a displaced young farm worker, whom she finds sleeping under a bench at the railroad station.