Movies: Dmitri Shostakovich

On the eve of his wedding, a young doctor leaves Moscow to see his mother who lives in a nature reserve. Things are complicated by the fact that the doctor's ex-girlfriend is also there, and she is expecting a child....

In the short-lived Commune of Paris, a conscripted soldier falls in love with a Communard saleswoman. As the army cracks down on the revolutionaries, the soldier is forced to fight against the Commune, and the pair's love is put to the test....

Who was the first to bring the great novel "12 Chairs" to the screen? You say "Leonid Gaidai" - and it will be a mistake. In our country, the first director was Alexander Belinsky (Leningrad television, 1966). Filming the favorite books of millions i...

A young woman, married to a wealthy man, but miserably lonely; trapped within a world ruled with an iron fist. Katerina is driven by a lust for life and for love. Her husband, though, is impotent; her father-in-law a tyrant. No wonder, then, that she...

A mouse sings a lullaby to her baby. Since he doesn't want to fall asleep, she turns to her neighbors for help....

Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, a lurid tale of sex, murder, and corruption, premiered in 1934 and was a success until Stalin saw it two years later, resulting in a Pravda review that viciously condemned it. It was later replaced by an expurg...

During harvest festival at a collective farm, a visiting dance troupe reunites a ballerina with her childhood friend Zina. In order to teach her unfaithful husband a lesson, Zina, the ballerina, and the ballerina’s husband decide to swap roles for th...

Five Days, Five Nights (Fünf Tage, Fünf Nächte) takes place in Dresden in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. While Dresden is in ruins, over two thousand paintings by artists including Rembrandt, Raphael, Rubens, Giorgione, and Vermeer ...

An exploration of 20th century Russia, following the fusing of the Party and the state after the Russian Civil War, which opened the doors to corruption, resulting in the exiling of the left and right opposition. Described using a combination of hist...

A 1935 USA trade-paper reviewer called it... "an impressive and technically outstanding historical drama dealing with czarist terrorism and revolutionary boiling in the days of 1907. Picture is one of the Soviet prize winners and has particular merit...

In the 1950s, a communist country. The film follows a retired detective who investigates two enigmatic murders. Both murders are connected to a murder exposing an old secret about a corrupt officer that causes controversy throughout the city and aler...

Girlfriends Zoya, Natasha and Asya live in Petrograd. Before the Civil War, young heroines are aware of the social injustice of life. When the war begins, the girls are recorded by the orderlies of the working group to protect the Bolshevik Petrograd...

A short film made by Yuri Norstein for the 60th anniversary of the October Revolution, The 25th - the First Day recounts that day using art from the revolutionary period....

An elderly couple and a younger man and woman follow up failed seduction attempts with conversation about love and the meaning of life....

From The Royal Ballet’s classical origins in the works of Petipa, to the home-grown choreographers who put British ballet on the world stage, this mixed programme highlights the versatility of the Company. Petipa’s Raymonda Act III is Russian classic...

A lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbass who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the Five Year Plan....

A man wants to flee wartime Germany and the detested Nazis to Columbia, where his brother lives. In order to achieve his goal he agrees to become an informer for the Reich....

Modest Mussorgsky's final opera, left unfinished at the time of this death in March of 1881....

Irina Evteeva’s debut quickly became a kind of manifesto for the one-room experimental studio: it defines classification by interweaving animation, appropriated footage, feature and documentary to form a unique whole, a film that rushes backwards int...

A mostly lost Soviet Union stop-motion version of this classic fairytale. The only surviving scene is called "Market"....