In the propaganda campaign that accompanied the establishment of Jewish autonomy in the USSR, the cinema played an important role. One of the first attempts to embody this theme in a cinema documentary was the film "Jews on the land". Its appearance was bound up with the cult figures of Soviet literary and artistic life at that time. The film's sequence of images shows elements of traditional Jewish life exclusively as relics from the past; only symbols of "modernisation" are given a positive connotation: a line of tractors, the filming of which required tractors from the whole region to be brought together, or an artesian well in the dry steppe, the only one for hundreds of kilometres around. It seems that in their publicistic zeal the creators of the film were striving not so much to reflect reality as to transfigure it by cinematic means.