Russian

A Soviet soldier, Andrei Sokolov, has been separated with his family by World War II. Suffering in Nazi captivity, he dreams of meeting his darlings after the victory. But cruel fate turned out otherwise.Read More »

The events just before, during and after World War Two have little direct effect on the inhabitants of the village inGeorgia where Zuriko lives. A schoolboy, Zuriko goes to the schoolhouse with his previously unlettered grandmother, who is receiving an education alongside him. He has some loyal, if slightly addled friends in the person of a myopic hunter named Illarion, and a one-eyed man named Illiko. So nearsighted is Illarion that on one occasion he shot Zuriko’s dog because the took it for a rabbit. The loyalty of his friends is proven after the war, when they sell the cow they all own in order to send Zuriko to college in Tblisi. This black and white film is notable for several things: its loving portrayal of the Georgian country people and countryside, and the fact that it was made by (Tenghiz Abuladze, who went on to make the extremely significant, award-winning 1984 film Monanieba, also known as Pokayaniye, or Repentance.Read More »

The main character, which is a prototype of Kafka, is on his way to achieving true self-cognition. The impetus for this was vague childhood memories associated with emotions, as well as the identification of his identity with certain images at that period. He is facing an internal conflict, tearing him apart, between creativity and reality that are not compatible with each other.Read More »

Quote:
The Russian film “The Return” is a stunning contemporary fable about a divided family in the wilderness – a simple, riveting film that almost achieves greatness.

In this hypnotic, stark movie, which won the Golden Lion (grand prize) of the last Venice Film Festival, we see a family strangely reunited: a father and his two sons traveling by car through the countryside after a 12-year separation. One of the boys, Andrei (the late Vladimir Garin), is obedient. The other younger son, Ivan (Ivan Dobronravov), is surly and rebellious.Read More »

Also know as “The Top Guy” and “The First Lad” , “Pervyy paren” is Sergei Paradjanov’s first solo film made for Dovzhenko studios! A musical comedy in the tradition of Russian propaganda films (very much in the tradition of Dovzhenko actually), with beautifully lush cinematography, colors and “mise-en-scene” – Not to be missed!Read More »

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 »

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 »

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 »