Russian

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 »

A widowed train engineer begins looking for a wife to help him raise his kids. He proposes to his girl friend, but she is not interested in caring for the children of another woman. Fortunately his persistence pays off and he finds a suitable wife and mother. Unfortunately, father turns out to be a selfish cad and when the old girl friend suddenly shows up again, he leaves his family without a backward glance. The angry wife also decides to leave, but just as she prepares to board the train, she sees the children running after her and decides to stay.

Won awards at the international film festivals in Tashkent, Helsinki, London and Tehran.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 »

Konets Veka is another Konstantin Lopushansky fantasy parable with the elements of a mystic thriller. The story takes place in Moscow in the autumn of 1993, during a strike; the army is assaulting the parliament, and Marina Nikolayevna and her daughter Olga have found themselves on opposite sides of the conflict. Six years later, Olga feels sorry for her mother and decides to invite her to Germany to have her treated at a mental hospital by a perverted doctor who promises to cure her. Olga’s mother, however, cannot shake the memory of her husband, who died in 1993 during the strike in Moscow.Read More »

Quote:
A sprawling meditation on the choreography of bodies in Moscow’s urban landscape, Detours depicts a new way of dealing illicit drugs via the Darknet, the layering of the physical and the virtual realities, as well as a poetics, and politics, of space. Taking place in sleepy neighbourhoods, among the concrete walls of high-rises, behind garages and amidst abandoned railroads, the film alternately follows and loses track of Denis, the treasureman who hides stashes of drugs all over the city.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 »

Banned for over 20 years by the Russian authorities for its controversial stance on anti-Semitism and women’s rights, THE COMMISSAR was finally screened at the Berlin Film Festival in 1988, where it won the Silver Bear and met with international acclaim.Read More »