Magnitogorsk, de jeugd van de hoogovens

People recount their experiences during the construction of the industrial town of Magnitogorsk, which was thrown up in the southern Ural Mountains in the thirties. The film centres around the stories of elderly people, who came to Magnitogorsk with their parents in those years. The building project also employed around 35,000 deportees as labourers. For the Stalin regime the new city with his huge blast-furnaces was a symbol for the glorious communist development of the Soviet Union. The film contrasts the actual circumstances with the cheerful image that Joris Ivens presented in Het lied van de helden (1932), another film about the construction of Magnitogorsk. (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam)