From the director of The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Never Sent and I Am Cuba, this is Kalatazov's most famous silent film. This is very much Soviet propaganda. It started off as a ethnographic film with a fictional story. The Svans are people of the Caucasus Mountains in Georgia, and they have a very ancient culture. The studio (or perhaps the government) made Kalatazov turn it into a documentary (semi-documentary) about Stalin's Five Year Plan and the way it was bringing backward peoples into modern society. The film ends with a montage on Soviets madly building a highway to Svanetia. Near the beginning of the film, there's some angry finger-pointing at Svanetia's supposedly unfair class system. Besides those injections of propaganda, though, the film is mostly about how difficult surviving in Svanetia is (they can't get salt - that's what the Soviets will bring them!). In that way, it's not unlike Bunuel's Las Hurdes or Shindo's The Naked Island or Flaherty's Man of Aran. While Kalatazov's utterly mad cinematography hadn't quite been perfected yet, the man is still a genius with his images. The montage pounds away violently and leaves you breathless. This should really be included in any list of the great Soviet silents.
Review of Salt for Svanetia
