The Paper Brigade

Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.

2018-03-15 | fr

Leninland

At the peak of Perestroika, in 1987, in the village of Gorki, where Lenin spent his last years, after a long construction, the last and most grandiose museum of the Leader was opened. Soon after the opening, the ideology changed, and the flow of pilgrims gradually dried up. Despite this, the museum still works and the management is looking for ways to attract visitors. Faithful to the Lenin keepers of the museum as they can resist the onset of commercialization. The film tells about the modern life of this amazing museum-reserve and its employees.

2013-11-30 | ru

Soviet Hippies

The hippie movement that captivated hundreds of thousands of young people in the West had a profound impact on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Within the Soviet system, a colorful crowd of artists, musicians, freaks, vagabonds and other long-haired drop-outs created their own system, which connected those who believed in peace, love, and freedom for their bodies and souls. More than 40 years later, a group of eccentric hippies from Estonia take a road trip to Moscow where the hippies still gather annually on the 1st of June for celebration that is related to the tragic event in 1971, when thousands of Soviet hippies were arrested by the KGB. The journey through time and dimensions goes deep into the psychedelic underground world in which these people strived for freedom.

2017-06-01 | et

Solidarność: How Solidarity Changed Europe

Gdańsk, Poland, September 1980. Lech Wałęsa and other Lenin shipyard workers found Solidarność (Solidarity), the first independent trade union behind the Iron Curtain. The long and hard battle to bring down communist dictatorship has begun.

2019-10-01 | de

Chernobyl 30 Years On: Nuclear Heritage

Thirty years after the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred on the night of April 26, 1986, its causes and consequences are examined. In addition, a report on efforts to strengthen the structures covering the core of the nuclear plant in order to better protect the population and the environment is offered.

2015-05-06 | en

Rich Hall's Red Menace

2019 marks the 30th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Rich Hall examines the relationship between the West and the USSR in his inimitable fashion.

2019-11-05 | en

The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography

Every image in The Fall of Communism as Seen in Gay Pornography comes from gay erotic videos produced in Eastern Europe since the introduction of capitalism. The video provides a glimpse of young men responding to the pressures of an unfamiliar world, one in which money, power and sex are now connected.

1998-01-06 | en

Man with a Movie Camera

A cameraman wanders around with a camera slung over his shoulder, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

1929-05-12 | ru

The Arrow of Time

President Mikhail Gorbachev recounts the end of the Cold War and the reduction of nuclear arms.

2017-10-03 | en

Michael Jackson: Moscow Case 1993

The Moscow Case is a 52 minute documentary with never-before-seen footage of Michael Jackson in Moscow during the "Dangerous" tour. This film tells the behind the scenes story of Jackson's ill fated concert in September 1993. It includes unique archival footage showing Michael close up and personal while meeting fans and playing with orphan children.

2011-01-01 | en

Little Potato

Wes Hurley's autobiographical tale of growing up gay in Soviet Union Russia, only to escape with his mother, a mail order bride, to Seattle to face a whole new oppression in his new Christian fundamentalist American dad.

2017-03-11 | en

Understanding The Georgian Republic

1993-02-08 | fr

The Living

Tells the story of the tragic events in Ukraine in 1932-33, the genocidal Great Famine or the Holodomor, and one Welshman's attempts to tell the world what was happening.

2009-01-01 | uk

Chernobyl: The Last Battle of the USSR

Three decades after the nuclear explosion, almost everything has been said about this ecological and sanitary disaster that made Pripiat a part of History. How did the greatest industrial disaster change the course of History, disrupt global geopolitics and, directly or indirectly, redistribute the balances and power relations of the twentieth century? The world will never be the same again. By retracing the incredible battle waged by the Soviet Union against radiation, this film proposes to retrace and enlighten an extraordinary story, while exploring the historical stakes in the medium and long-term…

2021-04-14 | fr

My Perestroika

Tells the story of five people from the last generation of Soviet children who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain. Just coming of age when the USSR collapsed, they witnessed the world of their childhood crumble and change beyond recognition. Through the lives of these former schoolmates, this intimate film reveals how they have adjusted to their post-Soviet reality in today's Moscow.

2010-01-24 | ru

Disco and Atomic War

A different history of the Cold War: how Estonians under Soviet tyranny began to feel the breeze of freedom when a group of anonymous dreamers successfully used improbable methods to capture the Finnish television signal, a window into Western popular culture, brave but harmless warriors who helped change the fate of an entire nation.

2009-04-10 | et

Hitler & Stalin: Portrait of Hostility

A double portrait of two dictators who were thousands of miles apart but were constantly fixated on each other.

2009-04-08 | de

Stalin's Last Plot

January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.

2011-08-26 | fr

An Ordinary Country

The story of what daily life was like in Poland under communism: private conversations, cruel interrogations, recruitment attempts, recorded and filmed with hidden devices; of how the secret services spied on every activity of ordinary citizens: nothing escaped the brutal system of control developed by the Soviets in the name of freedom.

2020-04-17 | pl

Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race

When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. But that history is bunk. The real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts. This remarkable feature-length documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age. A particular highlight is Alexei Leonov, the man who performed the first spacewalk, explaining how he found himself trapped outside his spacecraft 500 miles above the Earth. Scary stuff.

2014-10-13 | en