USSR

Sokurov’s first full-length feature film, filmed in 1978 and restored in 1987 at Lenfilm. The plot is based on the motives of Andrey Platonov’s works “The Potudan River” and “The Origin of the Master”.
The picture has become today a film classics, but in 1978 Sokurov was not allowed to defend his diploma at VGIK. Moreover, the film was sentenced to destruction by the cinematographic authorities. The authors miraculously managed to save the negative. In this picture, Sokurov formed an alliance with screenwriter Yuri Arabov and cameraman Sergei Yurizditsky.Read More »

Quote:
A 20-minute documentary of Jewish settlement in the Yevpatoria district of the Crimea. Exhibiting a certain amount of Jewish irony, Jews on the Land opens with scenes of a war-devastated shtetl (all that is left of the central market is a single pathetic fish stall), than shows an elderly Jew wandering about an even more desolate wilderness. Soon, however, sod-brick settlements rise and, as irrigation ditch criss-cross the once –barren plain, the now- productivised Jews are equally transformed: a new-born baby is named Forget-You-Sorrow. Tractor drivers and Young Pioneers’ are given particular pride of place and the film-makers emphasise that, among other livestock, these new Jewish peasants are raising pigs.
“Inside the film factory” by Richard Taylor, Ian ChristieRead More »

Two heros are placed face to face in this film; a famous medical professor who has kept his bourgeois lifestyle intact and a young man engaged in the Komsomol, an ardent enforcer of mankind’s new moral code for the construction of communism. But the severe young man falls in love with the professor’s wife.Read More »

PLOT:
Vertov and his Kino group produced this lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbas who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the five year plan. Enthusiasm is most noteworthy for it’s creative use of the new sound medium. Vertov liberated the recording equipment from the studio and shot sound on location. He also used common everyday sounds and wove them into what can only be described as a symphony. In fact, after seeing the film Charlie Chaplin wrote: “Never had I known that these mechanical sounds could be arranged to sound so beautiful. I regard it as one of the most exhilarating symphonies I have heard. Mr. Dziga Vertov is a musician.”Read More »

A strange phenomenon has been noticed on the outskirts of our Solar system that quickly approaches the Earth. It’s called “Orion’s Loop.” A spaceship with a crew of people and androids identical to them is sent to intercept the anomaly. But strange events start happening as the spaceship approaches the mysterious loop.Read More »

A single mother is confused by the changes in her teenage son, who has become distant since spending summer vacation with his father.Read More »

Anna Lawton wrote:
After a brilliant debut with Our Daily Bread (1965), co-directed with her husband Alexander Muratov, Muratova was allowed to make her own film, Brief Encounters (1967). On the surface the story was simple enough. Valentina, a conscientious civil servant in charge of the regional housing office, and Maxim, a geologist-prospector and guitar player devoted to an itinerant and adventurous life, have a difficult relationship – a series of brief encounters and lengthy separations. Their episodic meetings bring into focus their love and need for each other, but also their basic differences, disappointments, and resentment. There is a third character in this love triangle, Nadya, a country girl Valentina hires as a maid without knowing of her past relation with Maxim.Read More »

The rival of a worker on a Cossack stud farm exposes him during the war as a Nazi and rescues the owner’s daughter from a train about to be blown up by partisans.Read More »

Dnevnye Zvyozdy (“The Stars of the Day”, 1966) was based on poetess Olga Berggolts’s autobiography. She was a difficult figure for the authorities: though she stayed in Leningrad during the siege making inspirational radio broadcasts, her more personal work was suppressed, even after her death. Suspended strangely between interior monologue, poetic recitation, exterior action and memory, it won an award at the Venice Film Festival. It also introduced Talankin to the actress Alla Demidova, who appeared in most of his subsequent films.Read More »