A young teacher, Anaida, arrives in a mountain village to open a new, socialist school. This displeases a local kulak, outraged that the children will be "trained to live like collective farms." He declares that Anaida believes in God, and the bureaucrats from the district center fire her...
Ivan Perestiani acted in films directed by Yevgeny Bauer before the Revolution; he became a director in 1916. He made the first Soviet adventure hit, "Red Devils" (1923). However, he described his work in the late 1920s and early 1930s as "creative agony." The Main Repertoire Committee's assessment of "Light and Shadows" stated that the film "reveals the complete ideological bankruptcy of the old bourgeois director." Perestiani tried hard to "connect" with the present (the plot echoes Kozintsev and Trauberg's "Alone" and Nikolai Tikhonov's "Aina"), but the ideological approach was strained. However, the screen is illuminated by the dazzling beauty of the leading actress, Tatyana Makhmuryan.
