(Documentary
film, 52 min., by Boris Rabin aka Boris Karadzhev;
a German-Russian co-production of arte,
Lichtfilm, Mirumir and MDR.)
When I translated a treatment for this documentary in
2008 for Lichtfilm GmbH,
Cologne, the working title was still Creating a New Human
Race in the Soviet Union / Menschenlabor Sowjetunion; the latter, the German title, seems
to have been retained.
Oddly
enough, at Lichtfilm, the website proclaims the English title as The Breading of a Super Race, a title given after my involvement and
that makes me think of Cannibal Kiev. (Is the reference too obscure to be understood?) In any event, the title does not seem to appear on the DVD cover, as one can see above, or in the film credit sequence
First 8.5 Minutes –
in German:
in German:
The film
description at Lichtfilm's website, like most of their film
descriptions, was probably supplied by Google Translator
— Abraham Translations
definitely did NOT do it. It seems to be the description used everywhere on-line,
and is such a damning example of "Denglish" (Deutsch + English =
Denglish) that we won't use it here.
In short, The Breeding of a Super Race documents and
traces the various aspects of the Soviet Union's attempts, following the death of
Lenin, to create a "new man", be it for use as a soldier during war, for hard labor, or for laboratory testing. Aspects touched upon in the film
include cross-breeding between man and ape, rejuvenation by blood transfer, fixing conditional reflexes to genes, and artificially
inseminating women by the sperm of geniuses.
