This is a two-part video portrait of the outstanding Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of famous novels about the Russian revolution and the acclaimed study of the Soviet concentration camps, “The Gulag Archipelago”. Solzhenitsyn is of more interest to the filmmaker for his attitudes, thoughts and present life, than for his legendary past. Rather than interviewing some important person, Sokurov creates a monumental image before our eyes.Read More »
How will the relations of the two neighbors develop, after all, one of them is the head of the criminal investigation department, and the other is a criminal repeat offender.Read More »
“It seemed to me that on the other side of that forest, I would find a completely different life, the kind I could only dream of.” ~International Cinephile Society
Synopsis:
Lera is a young student of sociology by day and moonlights as a dancer in a strip club under the moniker Gerda to make a living. She is taking care of her ill mother while protecting her from the outbursts from her partner, Gerda’s father, who left them for another woman.Read More »
Quote:
The recent commercial and critical flourishing of Sakha cinema – within the Republic, across Russia, and on the global stage – has been remarkable. But no film culture emerges ex nihilo. There are always predecessors, inheritances, and vocabularies from which to build. In purely filmmaking terms, the origins of today’s “Sakhawood” lie in Soviet cinema history as well as in the early pioneers of the post-communist Republic; on a deeper cultural level, they derive from the shared visual and spiritual language of the people themselves. As their broad acclaim demonstrates, the recent wave of films have a universal appeal. But they also stand as proof of the vitality and creativity of a very particular worldview. All of this is encapsulated in Anatoly Vasiliev’s striking and (until now) rarely seen Summer House.Read More »
A stark experiment by director A. Fedorchenko and a new form of cinema, which takes the spectator into the recollections of the protagonist, along corridors of memory and through key events of Russian history from the Silver Age to WWII.Read More »
Brothers Mitya and Andrey want nothing more than to conquer the skies flying jets. To achieve this, they undergo Russian military pilot training. The twins watch out for each other – in every situation.Read More »
Quote:
For his directing début, Oleg Kovalov chose a very extravagant experiment. As a basis he took a propaganda film from the fifties, The Case of Corporal Kochetkov, dissected this as it were and gave the naked structure a new substance and new accents by re-cutting the shots and adding documentary material from the fifties, such as newsreel footage of Khrushchev’s visit to America and pictures of the visit by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret to Moscow. The film about corporal Kochetkov called on the Soviet citizens to be on their guard and showed how sly the enemy was: for instance it could pose as an innocent girl. Kovalov creams off the emotional froth from this melodrama, deconstructs its codes and subjects it to a thoughtful analysis. For instance he reveals paranoia and spy-phobia, complexes in the ‘collective Soviet unconscious’ that is still active even in relatively enlightened periods.Read More »
This is an interesting yet bizarre little tale of a fictional (as far as I know, anyway) experiment performed during the Stalin-controlled years in the USSR. The main character is changed from a woman into a man. This is part of a larger plan to change more women into men and have a stronger work-force/army, etc. It’s a very in-depth character study of the main character, who tries to fit into a world that she (now ‘he’) doesn’t really understand, especially since she’s now a man … Stalin dislikes the results of the experiments and has the scientist killed. Read More »
