But it was in 1967 that Moscow made a more ambitious attempt to bring Soviet cinema to India: the Soviet government reached out to the National Film Archives of India in Poona to organise a Soviet film retrospective. But the response would soon persuade the National Film Archives to ask for more time. Since Indian films were not censored in the Soviet Union, the average Soviet citizen had a better idea of India than Indians did of the Soviet Union. In a letter to the National Film Archives, MC Ramavarma Raja, patron of the Calicut Film Society, called the film “poetry in celluloid”. He also praised the other Soviet film screened in the city, Chapaev, a 1934 film about the Russian Civil War.