USSR

A young Uzbekistani man, whose widower father was a drunkard, finally finds the grown-up mentoring he craves when his father dies and he meets an old man who teaches him about the necessity of resisting tyranny. ~ Clarke Fountain, RoviRead More »

This short uses Zap Comix-style imagery to present a fable of an unemployed young American who finds a job in a Times Square shooting gallery — as a target. The evil capitalist eventually gets the idea of letting the boy build a family, and employing them all as targets to be shot at.Read More »

A boy finds a special jug and releases an ancient genie. The powerful and kind wizard is ready to fulfill all desires, but he doesn’t know anything about the reality of the 20th century.Read More »

The Snow Queen is a Hans Christian Andersen fable about a cold-hearted queen of the frozen north who steals away young Kay and takes him to her ice palace. Kay’s friend Gerda gets worried when Kay does not come home, and so she sets out to find him. Along the way, she meets an eccentric flower woman, a prince and a princess, a magical reindeer, a talking court raven, and many other fantastic characters. Once Gerda discovers that Kay is in the Snow Queen’s palace, she has to find some way to save him in spite of the formidable queen.Read More »

The year is 1921. Lenin and the Bolsheviks have just defeated the White Army and ended the Russian Civil War. However, the valuable diamonds that belonged to the ousted royal family are beginning to disappear. The Cheka have discovered that they are being smuggled out of the country by White sympathizers, and are determined to catch the thieves. Part detective mystery, part spy thriller, and part action adventure, Diamonds for the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is one of the defining Estonian films from the Soviet era.Read More »

Dersu Uzala is the enthralling tale of an eccentric indigenous frontiersman (Maxim Munzuk) who is taken on as a guide by a Soviet surveying crew. While the soldiers at first perceive Dersu as a naive and comical relic of an uncivilized age, he quickly proves himself otherwise with displays of ingenuity and bravery unmatched by any member of the inexperienced mapping team, on more than one occasion becoming their unlikely saviour. An amazing true story based on the memoir by Russian explorer Vladimir Arsenyev.

Filmed in the far reaches of Siberia, it took over two years for Director Akira Kurosawa to complete this timeless masterpiece of cinema which was shot in 70mm and was honoured with the Oscar for Best Foreign-Language Film in 1976.Read More »

Synopsis:
Two Soviet partisans leave their starving band to get supplies from a nearby farm. The Germans have reached the farm first, so the pair must go on a journey deep into occupied territory, a voyage that will also take them deep into their souls.Read More »

Quote:
A documentary about the Khatyn massacre.
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Another example of Adamovich’s struggle against official war memory is a documentary film for which he co-authored the script: Khatyn’, 5km (dir. by 1. Ko-lovskii, Belarusfilm, 1968) was never publicly screened in the USSR because its treatment of the Khatyn theme was considered too negative by state censorship.Read More »

synopsis, autro-transl.: Petrograd. 1919. An unemployed musician, trying to help his sick wife, steals wood from a neighbor – a speculator. Soon he is exposed and disgraced. But once the revolutionary troops are back in the city, there’s work for a musician – to support the morale of the weary soldiers.Read More »