Russia's Heart

Doctor Zhivago

December 1965 •English

The life of a Russian physician and poet who, although married to another, falls in love with a political activist's wife and experiences hardship during World War I and then the October Revolution.

Lenin: The Train

April 1990 •English

March/April 1917. The first world war is already a couple year to pace. A sealed train with Russian emigrants keeps on driving from Zürich Germany and Sweden to Sint-Petersburg. The outlaws stand under the guidance of Vladimir J. Lenin. Two senior officers support the revolutionary bomb "to ensure that everything runs smoothly. Yet there are some unpleasant clashes between Socialists and enthusiastic workers who are worried about the war. During train travel there comes an end to Lenin's affair with the gracious Inessa, and his wife Nadja is prepared take back him. The triumphant entrance in St. Petersburg will exceed all expectations....

Animal Farm

October 1999 •English

Animals on a farm lead a revolution against the farmers to put their destiny in their own hands. However this revolution eats their own children and they cannot avoid corruption.

Battleship Potemkin

December 1925 •Russian

A dramatized account of a great Russian naval mutiny and a resultant public demonstration, showing support, which brought on a police massacre. The film had an incredible impact on the development of cinema and is a masterful example of montage editing.

October (Ten Days that Shook the World)

May 1928 •Russian

Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution.

The World and the Flesh

April 1932 •English

During the 1917 Russian revolution, a group of artistocrats find themselves in the custody of a brutal Communist revolutionary. He lusts after one of them, a ballerina, and gives her an ultimatum: give in to him or her friends will face the firing squad.

Heart of a Dog

November 1988 •Russian

Old Prof. Preobrazhensky and his young colleague Dr. Bormental inserted the human's hypophysis into a dog's brain. A couple of weeks later, the dog became "human looking". The main question is "Is anybody who is looking like a man, A REAL MAN?"

Reds

December 1981 •English

An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.

We the Living, Part Two

September 1942 •Italian

After having been captured in a Crimea during a failed attempt to flee overseas, Leo returns in Petersburg for Kira.

Nicholas and Alexandra

November 1971 •English

Tsar Nicholas II, the inept last monarch of Russia, insensitive to the needs of his people, is overthrown and exiled to Siberia with his family.

26 Commissioners

December 1932 •

Docu-drama about political and military conflict during the Russian Civil War in 1918, from an orthodox pro-Communist viewpoint.

The Last Command

January 1928 •English

A former Imperial Russian general and cousin of the Czar ends up in Hollywood as an extra in a movie directed by a former revolutionary.

Captain Conan

October 1996 •French

The last days of World War I, Eastern front. Captain Conan, a lone wolf, a true warrior, leads a band of ruthless French fighters who love hand-to-hand combat; they are not fit for peacetime, they only feel really alive in the chaos of the battlefield.

The Soul Keeper

January 2003 •Italian

Zurich, 1905. Nineteen-year-old Russian Sabina Spielrein is put by her parents in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a severe form of hysteria and refusing to eat. A compassionate doctor, Carl Gustav Jung, takes her under his care and, for the first time, experiments with the psychoanalytical method of his teacher Sigmund Freud. Thus is born a sweeping story of love and passion, of body and soul, soaring to the utmost heights, but also plunging to the darkest depths of the 20th century.

Baltic Glory

February 1958 •Russian

Dreams of the Past

October 2022 •Russian

My Seven Sons

September 1970 •Azerbaijani

This film was based on Samad Vurgun's "Komsomol poem". Seven sons, like seven samurai become the seven komsomols (communist leaders) who were sent to a village to establish Soviet power. Seven sons become the romanticized images of people's heroes ready to take revenge.

Amangeldy

January 1938 •Russian

In 1916, a new Russian governor is sent to the Kazakhstan steppes by the Tsar and tries to impose mandatory military service upon the native Kazakhs. A popular uprising begins against the Tsarist empire. A Kazakh hero, Amangeldy Imanov, leads the revolt and allies with the Bolsheviks against the Kazakh clans loyal to the Tsar.

Arsenal

February 1929 •Russian

A soldier returns to Kyiv after surviving a train crash and encounters clashes between nationalists and collectivists.

Assassin of the Tsar

October 1991 •Russian

A new doctor from Moscow arrives at a provincial mental institution. His interest is the peculiarities of the psyche of a patient who believes that he is Yakov Yurovsky, the man who assassinated the last Russian tsar. In the course of their conversations it transpires that the patient is a kind of philosopher, not without a gift for suggestion. In a while the doctor himself falls under his patient’s influence: he tends to relive that fatal night of June 16-17, 1918 when, without any investigation or trial, Tsar Nicholas II, who had recently abdicated, was murdered, together with his wife, daughters and incurably ill heir. Soon the doctor realizes that the tragedy of the last Russian tsar is in part his own tragedy, too...