A Ukrainian "Western" which retells the story of a Crimean Tatar folk hero who stood up to the Russian colonial authorities' abuse, pillaging, and exploitation of the indigenous people of Qirim. Apart from the storyline of Russian abuse, the film also shows the authentic world of the Crimean Tatars, who were brutally expelled  after the Soviet reconquest of Crimea in 1944 from German occupation. Alim is based on a play by the Crimean writer Umer Ipci, whom the Soviets sent to a concentration camp and then imprisoned in a psychiatric ward. "Corrective psychiatry" was widely weaponized in the USSR to eliminate numerous indigenous artists and thinkers. The film's scriptwriter barely survived the Holodomor, the artificial famine created by the Soviets in Ukraine to break the peasants' resistance to collectivization, and the film's consultant, the founding father of modern Qirimli ethnography and the National Qirimli Museum, was murdered in a 1937 mass purge of Crimean intellectuals. The film's main lead was deported in 1944 from Crimea and was banned from ever acting again. He died in the 1950's, the location of his grave unknown. The film itself, which was widely praised in both the USSR and abroad, was banned in 1937 during the Great Purge.

DVD-R has Russian intertitles with switchable English and Spanish subtitles. Approx. 60 mins. See film sample for audio and video quality!