This profile of homeless young people in St. Petersburg, Russia, uses subtitles and narration to tell their tales, many of which focus on drugs, neglect and abuse.
Social & External
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, is remembered as the instigator of the October Revolution of 1917 and, therefore, as one of the men who changed the shape of the world at that time and forever, but perhaps the actual events happened in a way different from that narrated in the history books…
In 2012 two members of anarchistic female band Pussy Riot were sentenced to two years in a Mordovian labor camp for "hooliganism motivated by religious hatred". Russian film collective Gogol’s Wives follow each step of the feminist punk band’s battle against Putin including their first disruptive performances on a trolley bus, shooting a video about transparent elections, a controversial performance in a Red Square cathedral, and footage shot in a jail cell. Support comes from many corners including Madonna who painted the words "Pussy Riot" on her back and wore a balaclava during her Moscow show. The documentary portrays the grim state of present-day Russia, a country starkly divided between conservatism and anarchy. Pussy Riot believes that art has to be free and they're willing to take it to extremes. "Pussycat made a mess in the house," they say, and the house is Russia. The filmmakers do not seek to moralize, they simply edit events and leave viewers to draw their own conclusions.
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.
Only women, children and old people live in this Armenian village, while the men work in Russia. A life with a rhythm of its own, an independent daily life marked nonetheless by exile.
A candid, fly-on-the-wall BBC television documentary portrait of Russian Nationalist politician, Vladimir Zhirinovsky. The film shows the leader on a cruise surrounded by two hundred supporters getting plenty of media attention in New York. We are left with the nagging question: to what extent is Zhirinovsky really dangerous? To take that further, to what extent are populist politicians truly dangerous?
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.
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.
As his country is gripped by revolution and war, a Ukrainian victim of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster discovers a dark secret and must decide whether to risk his life and play his part in the revolution by revealing it.
In 2013, Dima Ilukhin, the cousin of the film’s director and a soldier in the Russian army, died on duty in the Republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus. He was 21 years old. This incident marks the starting point for Abaturov’s reflection on the military. He films the training of new recruits in Siberia, as they bid farewell to their mothers and girlfriends, learn the mechanics of a Kalashnikov, or how to throw a hand grenade and administer first aid. While his parents try to cope with their loss, Dima’s former fellow recruits have to return to battle.
After 20 years of living in Berlin, the director Olga Delane goes back to her roots in a small Siberian village, where she is confronted with traditional views of relationships, life and love. The man is the master in the home; the woman’s task is to beget children and take care of the household (and everything else, too). Siberian Love provides unrivaled insights into the (love) life of a Siberian village and seeks the truth around the universal value of traditional relationships.
Starting in 1881 this film shows the personal battle between Lenin's Ulyanov family and the royal Romanovs that eventually led to the Russian revolution.
Margarita Mamun, an elite Russian rhythmic gymnast, is struggling to become an Olympic champion. It is the most important year of her career and her last chance to achieve the ultimate goal, the gold Olympic medal. The film creates a captivating portrait of a young woman who is desperately trying to handle her own ambitions and meet the expectations of the official Russian training system.
The lifestyle, self-styling and political opinions of Chechen dictator Ramsan Kadyrov are examined in this documentary.
In Northern Russia, a few dozen people still live in their traditional houses surrounded by water, stone, and sand. Cut off from vital infrastructure, almost forgotten by regional governance, these people have to cope with their everyday struggles.
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.
A recording of Horowitz's historic 1986 recital in Moscow, the program also includes highlights of his return to his native Soviet Union--his first visit in 61 years.
Masha Drokova is a rising star in Russia's popular nationalistic youth movement, Nashi. A smart, ambitious teenager who – literally – embraced Vladimir Putin and his promise of a greater Russia, her dedication as an organizer is rewarded with a university scholarship, an apartment, and a job as a spokesperson. But her bright political future falters when she befriends a group of liberal journalists who are critical of the government, including blogger Oleg Kashin, who calls Nashi a "group of hooligans," and she's forced to confront the group's dirty – even violent – tactics.
Tells the story of how Edward Snowden managed to evade capture by the US. For the first time Snowden tells the story of how he managed to escape so that not to have to spend the rest of his life in an American prison.
For the first time, this documentary includes two exclusive interviews with Vladimir Putin and full details about actions in Crimea during spring 2014. These events determined the history of modern Russia. The President talks frankly and openly about the challenges and risks that Russia faced during that time. This film provides the Russian view of the situation. It is impossible to form a complete picture of the world without it.
Twenty-five years after she moved away, Canadian filmmaker Kristina Wagenbauer (a participant in the 2019 Talent Lab) returns to her native Russia to visit her grandmother – her Babushka – with whom she spent part of her childhood, in this film brimming with tenderness and humour. The two women reflected in the mirror bear an undeniable resemblance, and each seeks to recognize herself in the other. Plumbing her memories, Wagenbauer hopes to re-establish a lost bond of intimacy and to confront the wounds of the past. Babushka has survived the Second World War, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the void that her daughter and granddaughter left behind when they moved abroad, and, more recently, the death of the love of her life. Despite all of this, she holds to life with a strong spirit of resilience.
The complete history of hip-hop in Russia, from its underground stage to hitting huge stadiums, is seen through the eyes of the brightest and most iconic representatives of the profession. This film looks behind the scenes of Russian rap, exposing all the conflicts and clashes, showing the genre’s true colors and answering the question of how it managed to capture this generation’s attention and become their anthem.
Spectator is one of the early masterpieces by Zwartjes. The film explicitly shows one of Frans Zwartjes’ main themes: the relationship between husband and wife. It is a relationship that is strongly marked by power and domination, sexual attraction and repulsion. It manifests itself in humiliation and abuse (such Pentimento), but also in cool eroticism or natural physicality. Zwartjes’ goal is not to explain or designate this relationship. Rather it is the subject that Zwartjes uses to describe his world. In an article on Zwartjes, filmmaker and student George Schouten compares Zwartjes to the Italian writer Alberto Moravia. For both, sex is their way of dealing with reality. It is the subject by which they define their world. And for Zwartjes, it is also the subject with which he can display and develop his cinematic talent. (eyefilm.nl)
A compilation of three videos recorded during a private, invitation-only gig at The FunHouse in Bisbee, Arizona (where Stanhope lives, the audience is comprised of his close friends and neighbors) in 2016. Previously available as clips on YouTube, Stanhope released the three, 20-minute clips himself direct to streaming services, including Vimeo and Amazon, in late 2017.
A little girl disappears into an old wardrobe and the three friends Sveppi, Villi and Goi team up to save her. Together they have an incredible adventure taking them to new heights as they learn the true power of the magic wardrobe.
On a seemingly normal evening, a young girl has the misfortune of encountering the wrong people. For her, this turns into a nightmare in which she is not even sure if she will survive the night...
A direct stare into masculine interaction as we follow three boys in their mid-twenties, António, Xavier and Miguel testing the limits of their sexual flexibility.
Gerry and Rochelle are childhood sweethearts. Although Rochelle wants to settle down, Gerry wants his ambitions fulfilled first. The couple's relationship is threatened by the arrival of their childhood friend Tonette. Tonette seduces Gerry away from Rochelle by giving him a job, an apartment and herself. She agrees to share him with Rochelle at the same time hiring Rochelle as a maid. Things soon come to a head when Rochelle decides to leave Tonette's household after repeated attempts by Tonette's father, Don Teofilo, to defile her.
A television news anchorman, İsmet Berkan goes on a journey with his wife. Along the journey, out of the blue they start fighting. When he confesses that he cheated on her, she gets mad. Enraged, Leyla gets out of the car, enters a gas station and takes off with a man in a red sports car. Trying to track down his wife, the anchorman finds himself trapped in a bizarre world in the midst of murderers, cops and beautiful women.
Fulbert is a sidewalk artist who is duped into working for a counterfeiter. He accompanies a woman posing as a grieving widow on a trip to Spain in a hearse. Unaware she is the mistress of a notorious gangster, Fulbert is chased by thugs.
A smaller scale Eiffel Tower and the Champs-Elysées can be found just outside Shanghai; a copy of St. Peter’s in Rome can be found in Yamoussoukro, in the Ivory Coast: a journey over three continents to see the architecture of imitation, the uncanny world of the fake.
A deep dive into gaming culture through two not-so-reliable representatives of the community.
A disgraced police officer seeks to enforce justice however she can under a corrupt oligarchic system in this 20 minute short film.
In Seoul, there are 70 thousand taxis including 20 thousand corporate taxis and 40 thousand private taxis threading across the city. In most cases, a taxi driver works 12 hour shifts and must complete 20 to 30 trips a day in order to take home the smallest of earnings after paying 80 to 100 dollars to the taxi company. The taxi drivers go to every nook and cranny of the city with a variety of passengers at their side or in the back seat. One summer I became a taxi driver, driving one of Seoul’s 70 thousand taxis …
"Momentum is Belson's most serene and gentle film since Allures. This treatment of the sun as an almost dreamlike hallucinatory experience is both surprising and curiously realistic." -Gene Youngblood
Breathing is about the thin space between life and death. 34-year-old Neil Platt plans his own funeral, muses about the meaning of life and the impossibility of terminating a mobile phone contract. With 5 months left to live, and paralyzed from the neck down by Motor Neurone Disease, he ponders how to communicate about his life in a letter for his baby son. How can he anticipate what he might want to know about his father in a future he can only imagine?
Moira Brooker and Philip Bretherton (Judith and Alastair from As Time Goes By (1992)) host this behind-the-scenes look at the work of the writers behind many of our favorite "Britcoms" (British situation comedies), revealing how their ideas make it to the screen.
A woman's lifelong pursuit of lost family diamonds is interrupted by the appearance of two escaped convicts.