USSR

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It is the last film of the Solovyov trilogy and possibly the last “underground” soviet film. A great scientist returned from US, where he was given a PC (a very rare and expensive thing for Russia of that time) and some other awards for his outstanding research. The KGB and “Bratva” did the best to meet him at his motherland and get a piece of his prize. Besides, it is the film of the last years of “perestroika” which was, in itself, the mass hallucination. So that is the way Solovyov made his film.Read More »

Film shows dramatic events in a small Lithuanian village community, where people are split between the soviet supporters and the “brothers in the woods” – anti-Soviet guerrillas – who are fighting to defend their land from the Soviets after the end of the Second World War. The film story is about the revenge of the sons of a village chairman, who is killed by guerrillas. The choice to make the film following some Western genre conventions allowed Žalakevičus approach the soviet version of recent Lithuanian history in a more open and humanistic way. Nobody wanted to die – neither the father who was killed, nor the Brothers from the forest; and nobody wanted to kill, either.Read More »

When the King of Denmark suddenly dies. his son, Crown Prince Hamlet, returns home to find that his Uncle Claudius has usurped the throne and married his sister-in-law, Hamlet’s recently-widowed mother. One night Hamlet is visited by his father’s ghost, who commands him to avenge his murder at Claudius’ hands.Read More »

Atamanov’s sublime and terrifyingly beautiful masterpiece, based on a Hans Christian Andersen story, follows a resourceful young girl, Gerda (voiced by Yanina Zheymo), as she embarks on an epic journey to save her friend Kay (Anna Komolova) from the frozen embraces of the magnificent Snow Queen (Mariya Babanova.) “Had I not one day seen ‘The Snow Queen’ during a film screening hosted by the company labor union, I honestly doubt that I would have continued working as an animator.” – Hayao MiyazakiRead More »

An almost impossibly lovely, bejeweled fantasy adventure, a mixture of Ptushko’s THE STONE FLOWER and SADKO with Cocteau’s BEAUTY & THE BEAST. A ship’s captain promises his youngest daughter Nastenka (voiced by Nina Krachkovskaya) a scarlet flower as a gift. But when he plucks it, the enraged beast who owns it demands a sacrifice – and Nastenka offers herself up as the monster’s prisoner on an enchanted isle.Read More »

Pilot Mimino works at small local airlines in Telavi, Georgia, flying helicopters between small villages. He dreams of piloting large planes for major international airlines, so he goes to Moscow for refresher courses. There in a hotel he meets truck driver Rubik from Dilijan, Armenia who is given a place in that hotel by mistake. Together they have many adventures in Moscow. However, both are homesick and long for their family, friends, and hometowns in the Caucasus.Read More »

Based upon the famous novel by H.G.Wells. A poor scientist named Griffin discovers a way to make things invisible. Since he has no money to continue his research, he decides to perform his only experiment on himself. After becoming invisible, Griffin has a lot of trouble trying to conceal this from other people.Read More »

The final film from Russian fantasy master Aleksandr Ptushko (ILYA MUROMETS, SAMPO), RUSLAN AND LUDMILA was a glorious and magical summation of his career: a 2-1/2 hour greatest hits package filled with the sweeping lyricism, bejeweled visual F/X and mythic storytelling that put him on par with Walt Disney, Ray Harryhausen and Mario Bava. Based on an epic fairy tale written in 1820 by Alexander Pushkin (Ptushko had previously adapted Pushkin’s THE TALE OF TSAR SALTAN, and half-jokingly said they were related), the film opens with the seemingly-joyous marriage of bogatyr (warrior) Ruslan (Valeri Kozinets) to Ludmila (Natalya Petrova), the daughter of Prince Vladimir. (Like his earlier ILYA MUROMETS, the action of the film is set during the legendary era of the Kyivan Rus’ culture that pre-dated both modern Ukraine and Russia.)Read More »

“Film-collage” made from what was saved from the destruction of the negatives by the Soviet authorities of what was to be a feature film. There is no story as such: on a single stage, different people in different attitudes follow one another without any explicit link between them or any form of logical coherence in what they do; the whole thing is presided over by a markedly surrealist air with certain dreamlike resonances.Read More »