Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train window sparks the return of his memory. He makes...
Central Asia during the Civil War. The Jarkent battalion of the Red Army, located in the Verny (now Alma-Ata), receives an order from Frunze to go to the Fergana region to fight the Basmachi. A group of kulaks, with the support of local merchants and beys, incites the unconscious, wavering mass of...
Japanese forces land in the port of Vladivostok during Russian civil war, supporting anti-communist forces, while local population joins Far Eastern Republic and partisans in the struggle against the intervention and White army.
The film tells the story of an ordinary guy Anton Kandidov. First he works on agricultural work — transports on boat on Volga watermelons. Noticing how deftly Anton catches and loads watermelons, he is told that he could become a goalkeeper and play football. And he decides to follow the advice....
The peaceful life of an exemplary collective farm is being rent asunder by shortages and dissent, and a commissar is sent to uncover the source of the problems, unaware that their is actual sabotage involved.
An adaptation of Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave,” about a musician dying of hunger in his large, unheated Petersburg apartment because he was not needed in the revolutionary city.
Produced by the Soviet Union to justify its 1939-40 Winter War campaign in Finland, this outstanding documentary---more than any other such cinematic record---visually depicts the much vaunted Mannerheim Line in all its actual emplacements, as seen but two weeks after their capture, and as filmed...
This little known Russian movie, from the director of the following year's Oblomok imperii/ A Fragment of Empire is both surprising and accomplished. The mute cobbler is interested in the local girl but she is already pregnant by one of the gang of sailor suit toughs. The Soviet Youth League...
The whole world knows the immortal feat of the residents of besieged Leningrad, accomplished during the Great Patriotic War. The tragic story of the blockade, which lasted for nine hundred days and ended with the defeat of the fascists at the gates of the unconquered city, will forever remain in...
A young country girl who becomes an apple seller is seduced and abandoned. She finds a protector but when he is arrested for theft she finds honest work in a factory.
