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Every night, Soviet tractors comb the coast of Latvia looking for signs of anyone who could have infiltrated the Soviet border from the sea. One morning, three Soviet patrolmen...LEARN MORE.
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Director Boris Frumin returned to his native Russia after 16 years in exile to make this drama set in a small Russian town in 1965--an era when hard-line communism made a profound...LEARN MORE.
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The familiar tale of an immigrant family's journey to America is turned into a magical mystery tour as seen through the eyes of 11-year old Motl. The boy's imagination spins wildly as he...LEARN MORE.
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Rescued from Russian film archives, this was Andrei Tarkovsky's diploma film for the Soviet State Film School. Before this video release, it was largely unseen even by some of the...LEARN MORE.
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Vasiliy Sitnikov was officially declared insane, and he spent his life in and out of mental institutions. Yet, he is the key figure of the non-conformist art movement in the former Soviet Union...LEARN MORE.
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In this extraordinary epic--a political thriller in the tradition of Z and Weekend, mixed with acid-sharp humor--Peter Lutsik creates an astounding chronicle of a country in violent...LEARN MORE.
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Considered by many the finest screen adaptation of Shakespeare’s greatest work, Grigori Kozintsev’s Hamlet is a spare, haunting interpretation based on a translation by novelist...LEARN MORE.
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Hailed as one of the best adaptations of this Shakespearean tragedy, Grigori Kozintsev’s King Lear is a striking, epic interpretation based on a translation by novelist Boris...LEARN MORE.
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Two early short films by Russian auteur Alexander Sokurov (Russian Ark) are collected in Elegy of the Land. Both of these moody, melancholy works emphasize the significance of the...LEARN MORE.
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A moving portrait of the extraordinary Soviet poet, Anna Akhmatova. Although her work was banned and went unpublished for 17 years, her poem "Requiem"...LEARN MORE.
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This controversial documentary created a storm in Russia by taking the cloak off a violent, repressive period of Soviet history. Filmmaker Semyon Aranovich found the last surviving...LEARN MORE.
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Semyon Aranovich's documentary is a brilliant assembly of eyewitness testimony and rare archival photographs and materials. The film records the Machiavellian power plays between...LEARN MORE.
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Based on the Chekhov short story of the same name, The Lady with the Dog (Dama s sobachkoy) is a forgotten masterpiece from a tense period during the Khrushchev thaw. Told with...LEARN MORE.
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The film takes a deeper look into Russian anti-Semitism by showing archival accounts of famous Russian actor, Solomon Mikhoels and of Russian Jewish doctors charged for...LEARN MORE.
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In this irreverent screwball comedy, Dušan Makavejev revisits the idiosyncratic style that brought him to the forefront of the international art-house community with...LEARN MORE.
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"Paradoxically, the two most powerful films of Shakespeare plays were made not in Great Britain but in the Soviet Union" (Richard Dyer, Boston Globe). Three of Russia's legendary...LEARN MORE.
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Overshadowed by the immensity of films like Solaris and Andrei Rublev, here are two lesser known works from Andrei Tarkovsky. Rescued from Russian film archives, The Steamroller and the...LEARN MORE.
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Friendship knows no borders, as seen in these two timely dramas from contemporary Turkey. In Journey to the Sun (Yesim Ustaoglu, 1999, 104 mins.), Mehmet, a young man from western Turkey, and Berzan, a Kurdish rebel living in the underground, develop an unlikely friendship while living in Istanbul. When Mehmet is mistaken for a Kurd and arrested, he begins to understand his new friend's struggles, which ultimately lead to tragedy and Mehmet taking a long journey to Berzan's homeland. Then in Boats Out of Watermelon Rinds (2004, 101 mins.), director Ahmet Ulucay portrays the innocence of childhood and the lure of the cinema for two teens in a small Turkish village. By day, one works for a watermelon seller and the other for a barber. But at night, they devote themselves to rebuilding an old film projector and dream of being famous film directors. In Turkish and Kurdish with English subtitles.
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The bold documentaries of Semyon Aranovich created a storm of controversy in Russia by revealing the truth behind a violent, repressive era of Soviet history. This trio of...LEARN MORE.
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