The General Line

Marfa (Marfa Lapkina), a poor peasant woman in a village where nearly everyone is hungry and cannot read, decides one day that she will not go on living the old way. She turns to the new Soviet state and its machines to change how her neighbors work and what the land gives them. Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov set her against the village itself, and she has to win over people who have farmed the same way for generations.