45 WORDS: Inspired by the woman who edited “Man with a Movie Camera” (1929), “Woman with an Editing Bench” reveals the personal impact of Stalin’s censorship of cinema on a woman navigating politics, bureaucracy and the impetuous outbursts of collaborators to create something beautiful despite the odds. 100 WORDS: “Woman with an Editing Bench” is about sustaining creativity and fighting repression. 1930s, Soviet Russia: Dziga Vertov and Elizaveta Svilova make radical, groundbreaking films. Threatened by their innovations, Stalin pressures his henchman, Boris Shumyatsky, to suppress them. Vertov, unhappy, artistically constrained, is inept at working with bureaucracy. Svilova knows how to work the system laterally and from behind the scenes - as all great editors do. She is also adept at working with Vertov’s mind, understanding what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. Svilova’s editing makes Vertov’s genius possible. Vertov’s eccentricity makes Svilova’s editing genius indispensable. 138 WORDS: “Woman with an Editing Bench” is set in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, when avant-garde artists of the Russian Revolution are being brutally murdered and suppressed by Stalin. It tells the story of a film editor who uses her creativity to navigate the politics, hardship and scarcity, the stranglehold of bureaucracy and the impetuous outbursts of collaborators, to create something beautiful despite the odds. Inspired by a true story, this short fictional drama pays homage to the genius of Elizaveta Svilova - the unsung editor behind Dziga Vertov’s 1929 documentary masterpiece “Man with a Movie Camera” (No 1 on the “Sight and Sound” list of Best Documentaries of all time). It uses her revolutionary editing techniques to show the power of creativity, compassion and sustaining love to keep an artistic vision alive in the face of political censorship.