Animated Soviet Propaganda

Moscow 1996, Vote or Lose!

November 2021 •French

Moscow, January 1996. Boris Yeltsin gets ready to run for a second mandate of the presidency of the young Russian Federation. Polls are in the single digits. A painful economic transition, war in Chechnya, and the rise of criminal groups have left the majority of Russians dissatisfied with Yeltsin… and willing to vote for the communist leader Gennady Zyuganov. Yet six months later, Yeltsin won the election with nearly 54% of the vote. How did that happen?

Closing Gambit: 1978 Korchnoi versus Karpov and the Kremlin

October 2018 •English

The story of the 1978 World Chess Championship between the Soviet Communist Party's protege, Anatoly Karpov and the traitor and Soviet defector, Viktor Korchnoi. One of those instances in life where truth is stranger than fiction.

Land Without Bread

December 1933 •Spanish

An exploration —manipulated and staged— of life in Las Hurdes, in the province of Cáceres, in Extremadura, Spain, as it was in 1932. Insalubrity, misery and lack of opportunities provoke the emigration of young people and the solitude of those who remain in the desolation of one of the poorest and least developed Spanish regions at that time. (Silent short, voiced in 1937 and 1996.)

The Great Meeting

January 1951 •

Once upon a time there lived a journalist. Eager to spark interest in his boss’s newspaper, he published news of a colourful bird, more like a parrot than a chicken, less like an ostrich than a swan. No one could work out the origin of this strange bird and a web of sensational stories soon spun, but it burst the moment it came out that the witty journalist repainted an ordinary duck. From that moment on every lie journalists tell is called a ‘canard’. Our film leads directly to the nest of one such duck, in Bucharest, where the inform-propaganda spin doctor Pavel Judin, instructed by wise managerial orders and Moscow, overblows this featherless bird to the pleasure of ones and the derision of others.

Railway Station

January 1980 •Polish

Kieslowski’s later film Dworzec (Station, 1980) portrays the atmosphere at Central Station in Warsaw after the rush hour.

The Wall

November 1962 •English

Like the best USIA films, The Wall distills political events into an emotionally clear and compelling ideological "story". In 1962 Walter de Hoog gathered footage from U.S. and German newsreel sources and crafted this taut short film about the first year of the Berlin Wall. Straightforward, keenly balanced narration portrays Berliners as "accepting the wall but never resigned to it". The extraordinary footage of the first escapes was propaganda enough-- His challenge was to make the politics human.

The Iron Giant

August 1999 •English

In the small town of Rockwell, Maine in October 1957, a giant metal machine befriends a nine-year-old boy and ultimately finds its humanity by unselfishly saving people from their own fears and prejudices.

The Distant Drummer: A Movable Scene

January 1970 •English

Robert Mitchum narrates an anti drug propaganda film.

The World's Biggest Bomb Revealed

July 2011 •English

National Geographic 2011 Documentary on the World's Biggest Bomb (UK).

The Great Hack

January 2019 •English

Data—arguably the world’s most valuable asset—is being weaponized to wage cultural and political wars. The dark world of data exploitation is uncovered through the unpredictable, personal journeys of players on different sides of the explosive Cambridge Analytica/Facebook data story.

Nuclear Nightmares

November 1979 •English

Peter Ustinov hosts this haunting 1980 documentary exploring the world's nuclear weaponry and the fragile system that deters either side from initiating the first nuclear strike. Although the world's political climate has mellowed since the Cold War era, Nuclear Nightmares takes the viewer back in time to gain a perspective of what it was like to live under a very real nuclear threat.

Land of White Alice

January 1960 •English

Film sponsored by Western Electric (AT&T's equipment manufacturing division), the builder of the United States Air Force's White Alice Communications System in Alaska. Introduces the people and geography of the new state as well as the Western Electric radio-relay system, which links far-flung military sites, alert stations, and missile-warning facilities. Ralph Caplan praised the film's "intrinsically dramatic and highly photogenic" portrayal of communications equipment.

Iran: The Hundred Year War

February 2009 •French

What kind of world power is Iran becoming, and how will Western countries deal with it?

Lion and Bull

August 1984 •Russian

Award winning animated short film by Fyodor Khitruk.

Never Again Is Now Global

Invalid date •English

Holocaust survivors, children of survivors, and grandchildren - as well as German freedom fighters - express their shock at the Covid era's fear-mongering and divisive dictates that are reminiscent of the prelude to the Holocaust. This ambitious five-part docu-series is the brainchild of Holocaust survivor and human rights activist Vera Sharav.

The Cars We Drove into Capitalism

October 2021 •Bulgarian

A cinematic, character-driven insight to what it meant to produce and to own a car in communist times: the Socialist propaganda dreams and the hard reality of living that dream. The freedom that these slow and clumsy vehicles were giving to their owners; the cars as an instrument in the Cold War battle; legends and homemade tune-ups as an attempt to stand at least a little bit off the crowd.

The Atom And Us

May 2020 •English

The Man Who Saved the World

October 2012 •English

During the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, Soviet Navy officer Vasily Arkhipov refused to launch a nuclear strike and saved the world from nuclear war and total destruction.

A Japanese Pipe Dream

January 1943 •English

When this propaganda film begins the narrator states that before the beginning of World War II, Japan was the only one of thirty-five nations to refuse to sign an anti-narcotics treaty and alleges that this was because the country's leaders planned to use drugs as a weapon of war.

The Silent Village

September 1943 •English

The true story of the massacre of a small Czech village by the Nazis is retold as if it happened in Wales.