“[…] Few of the films produced by Ermolieff in Yalta have been conserved, which makes the discoveries made in recent years even more valuable. The two movies by Volkov which have been found at Gosfilmofond – People Perish for Metal and Beauty Contest – and The Other Person’s Child by Jacob Protazanov, found in the Netherlands Filmmuseum, show that Yalta production was probably politically free, following the lines of psychological drama interspersed with mystical elements which were already present in Russian cinema at the end of the 1910’s. The outdoor scenes of The Other Person’s Child confirm the theory that the movie was shot in Yalta (even though in the catalogues it is indicated only as an “Ermolieff Production”); the image of a ship appears, which, after L’anguissante aventure by Protazanov – as a witness to the exile of Ermolieff’s group (from Yalta to Paris, via Costantinople and Marseilles) – was to become a permanent metaphor for journey in the films of the Russian exiles.

Regarding the morale of Ermolief’s group while in Yalta, we have the evidence of Jacob Protazanov’s letter to his sister, Nina Angiaparidze, dated May 13th, 1919: ‘My dear sister, your brother, who loves you very much, sends you his greetings. My life is rather boring and always the same. I am waiting for some new work and for a letter from you’.

Perhaps Ermolieff was less bored than his most important director who, despite the tedium, managed nevertheless, over the two years in question, to make at least ten movies. Ermolieff had the task of saving a studio and had been used to fighting for survival for some time. The “Torgovyj dom I.N. Ermolieva”, founded in 1915, had become, although not officially, a sort of branch of Pathé, whose influence on the Russian market had meanwhile become progressively weaker”.

Natalya Nussinova, in Cinegrafie, VI, n. 9, 1996