Babitsky's War

Beyond Borders

October 2003 •English

Sarah Jordan, an American living in London in 1984, is married to the son of a wealthy British industrialist. She encounters Nick Callahan, a renegade doctor, whose impassioned plea for help to support his relief efforts in war-torn Africa moves her deeply. As a result, Sarah embarks upon a journey of discovery that leads to danger, heartbreak and romance in the far corners of the world.

Labor rhythms of Checheno-Ingushetia

January 1972 •Russian

Documentary film about the labor activity of residents of Chechen-Ingush ASSR

The Betrayed

January 1995 •English

As Russian tanks advance over the plains of Chechnya, a group of Russian mothers search for the sons, conscripts from the ill-fated 131st Brigade, they believe have been captured by the Chechens. They place their trust in Colonel Kosov, a Russian liaison officer responsible for organising prisoner exchanges across the front line.

Prisoner of the Mountains

March 1996 •Russian

Two Russian soldiers, one battle-seasoned and the other barely into his boots and uniform, are taken prisoner by an anxious Islamic father from a remote village hoping to trade them for his captured son.

War

March 2002 •Russian

During the bloody war in Chechnya, a British couple and two Russian soldiers are taken hostage by Chechen rebels. Two of the hostages are then released to bring the money for the British woman who is forced to wait for the ransom.

Business Trip to Death

January 1996 •German

Short documentary about Russian special forces during the Third Battle of Grozny during the First Chechen War

Dictator: One Crazy Job

June 2013 •French

They’ve become the human face of inhuman barbarity. Leaders like Hitler, Idi Amin Dada, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu, Bokassa, Muammar Kadhafi, Khomeini, Mussolini and Franco governed their countries completely cut off from reality. These paranoid leaders were driven to abuse their power by the pathology of power itself. Dictators are driven by a relentless, thought-out determination to impose themselves as infallible, all-knowing and all-powerful beings. But they are also men ruled by their caprices, uncontrollable impulses, and reckless fits of frenzy, which paradoxically render them as human as anyone else. The abuses they committed were clearly atrocious, yet some of them were as outlandish as the characters portrayed in the film The Dictator. They sunk to depths worthy of Kafka: so incredibly absurd, they are outrageously funny.

Kadyrov, The Dictator of Chechnya

May 2018 •French

Purgatory

March 1998 •Russian

This is a story about the battle for a hospital building in Grozny (Chechnya) in January 1995 between Russian Army forces and Chechen rebels supported by Arabian mujahideen and international mercenaries. Although the story is fictional, most of the characters are based on real-life prototypes and events are the compilation of true events during the Grozny Siege in the First Chechen War.

No Nation Without Culture

October 2022 •Russian

“While shooting my feature documentary film, Memory, in April of 2021 in Grozny, Chechnya (the birthplace of my mother and where I grew up), I felt the influence of the gigantic portraits of Putin, Kadyrov Senior and Kadyrov Junior all over the city. They observed me from everywhere. In parallel to the production of the film, we set out to capture the feeling of totalitarianism that these portraits conveyed. We got up at 4 in the morning and shot through the window of a car because such actions put us under threat of persecution. We understood that we were documenting the time of the birth of fascism in Russia.” Vladlena Sandu

Eliso

October 1928 •Georgian

Georgia, 1864. The Tsarist regime is using Cossacks to forcibly resettle Muslim Georgians to Turkey in order to steal their land. Meanwhile a Muslim girl falls in love with a Christian from the next village.

Hell

January 1995 •Russian

Alexander Nevzorov's documentary of the storming of Grozny in 1994-95

60 Hours of the Maikop Brigade

January 1995 •Russian

A two-part documentary about the Russian Army's disastrous assault on Grozny on New Year's Eve, 1994.

12

June 2007 •Russian

A loose remake of “12 Angry Men”, “12” is set in contemporary Moscow where 12 very different men must unanimously decide the fate of a young Chechen accused of murdering his step-father, a Russian army officer. Consigned to a makeshift jury room in a school gymnasium, one by one each man takes center stage to confront, connect, and confess while the accused awaits a verdict and revisits his heartbreaking journey through war in flashbacks.

Target of Opportunity

July 2005 •English

Jim Jacobs and Nick Carlton, childhood friends, are CIA operatives on a sting operation in Chechnya. The raid of a rebel militia group goes bad and the entire teams gets wiped out except for Jim and Nick, who manages to save them both. Five years later, they are out of the CIA game.

The Cage is Looking for a Bird

October 2023 •Chechen

In a small Chechen village, Yaha spends her days with Madina, with whom she is very close. Both girls dream of leaving their homes after graduation and escaping to the real world, far from their village. Yaha’s older sister Heda also dreams of being free, but the price for this is very high - if she decides to try for a divorce, her only son will be taken away from her, such are the traditions in her culture. Will Yaha, Madina and Heda succeed to get free, and at what cost?

The Sum of All Fears

May 2002 •English

When the president of Russia suddenly dies, a man whose politics are virtually unknown succeeds him. The change in political leaders sparks paranoia among American CIA officials, so CIA director Bill Cabot recruits a young analyst to supply insight and advice on the situation. Then the unthinkable happens: a nuclear bomb explodes in a U.S. city, and America is quick to blame the Russians.

Fear

November 2018 •German

Mikail had to flee Chechnya for being homosexual. Unexpectedly meeting his old childhood-friend Daud in Germany, Mikal is not only faced with a renewed friendship, but a recurring fear of persecution.

Red Sparrow

February 2018 •English

Prima ballerina Dominika Egorova faces a bleak and uncertain future after she suffers an injury that ends her career. She soon turns to Sparrow School, a secret intelligence service that trains exceptional young people to use their minds and bodies as weapons. Dominika emerges as the most dangerous Sparrow after completing the sadistic training process. As she comes to terms with her new abilities, she meets a CIA agent who tries to convince her that he is the only person she can trust.

Social Skills

October 2021 •English

Henry Hills is among the film artists who, like filmmaker Abigail Child, marries frenetically fast image montage with split-second music and sound editing: the changes in rhythm and mood stream so fast they create a giddy delirium in the spectator. SOCIAL SKILLS provides Hills with the perfect subject: discontinuous fragments from a 60-day class in liberated body movement led by David Zambrano in Belgium. The soundtrack does the splits between disco funk and cartoon noise effects. Is it dance, childlike play, or the Utopian vision of a community of negotiated differences? It is all of these things at once.