Mezhrabpomfilm

This documentary, made up of 3 episodes, is based on three songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.

A young man travels to Mars in a rocket ship, where he leads a popular uprising against the ruling group with the support of Queen Aelita, who has fallen in love with him after watching him through a telescope.

In 1918 a young and simple Mongol herdsman and trapper is cheated out of a valuable fox fur by a European capitalist fur trader. Ostracized from the trading post, he escapes to the hills after brawling with the trader who cheated him. In 1920 he becomes a Soviet partisan, and helps the partisans fight for the Soviets against the occupying British army. However he is captured by the British when they try to requisition cattle from the herdsmen at the same time as the commandant meets with a reincarnated Grand Lama. After the trapper is shot, the army discovers an amulet that suggests he is a direct descendant of Genghis Khan. They find him still alive, so the army restores his health and plans to use him as the head of a puppet regime. The trapper is thus thrust into prominence as he is placed in charge of the puppet government. By the end, however, the "puppet" turns against his masters in an outburst of fury.

Two men shipwrecked on an island in the Caspian Sea are saved by members of a collective farm, where they work on its fishing boats and woo the young woman leading the fishermen.

In a remote Russian village during World War I, colourful and nuanced characters experience divided loyalties: family loyalty vs. personal desire, nationalism vs. transcendent humanism.

Naturally, the circus milieu of 2 Buldy 2 (1929) encourages stunts. A father and son, both clowns, are to perform together for the first time, but the civil war separates them, and the elder Buldy, tempted for a moment to acquiesce to the White forces, casts his lot with the revolution. At the climax Buldy Jr. escapes the Whites thanks to flashy trampoline and trapeze acrobatics; the gaping enemy soldiers forget to shoot.

Life is short and full of oppression, but that doesn't mean Parasha can't find love and laughter when she leaves her country home to take a job as a maid in the overcrowded, overworked, and underpaid world in the big city.

Based on the Russian fairy tale Father Frost.

A 1925 Soviet comedy sponsored by the Soviet Finance Ministry, with a plot promoting the new economy. A small-town tailor, Petya Petelkin (Ilyinsky), bought a lottery ticket and handed it to his landlord, widow Shirinkina (Deykun) who wants to marry him. Petya is a hard-working tailor trying to start his own business. He is also in love with Katya (Maretskaya), whom he wants to marry. He has to survive a cascade of funny situations in the unstable Soviet reality, before his romance with Katya comes to a happy ending.

As a response to criticism for the allegedly excessive “mass appeal” of his earlier epic STORM OVER ASIA (1928), Vsevolod Pudovkin unleashed his flair for experimentation in what was supposed to be the director’s first sound feature. Everything went wrong: technical problems forced him to complete the film as a silent; viewers were baffled by the lack of a recognizable plot; then, the ideological climate of the Soviet Union changed. He was now being blamed for catering to bourgeois taste! Time has come to set the record straight. Here’s lyrical cinema at its best, deliberately operatic and yet intimate as it matches the characters’ inner life with the solemn rhythms of nature, and depicted through breathtaking black-and-white photography. A sensation at last year’s Pordenone fest, Pudovkin’s long-forgotten swan song to the art of montage is resurrected by Gabriel Thibaudeau’s emotionally charged live music performance. –PCU (USSR, 1930, 75m)

A group of Ukrainian women are forced to work in the mine under the supervision of cruel enemy soldiers. When the soldiers are forced to retreat and decide to blow up the mine, the women organize a guerrilla action to stop them.

History of theft and double crossing when two thieves fall out over the theft of the money of the proceeds of the sale of a house by a banker to a religious community.

The film is based on real events and reveals the tragic episodes from the life of the Austrian biologist scientist-materialist Paul Kammerer (1880-1926), hunted by regressive scientists and Catholic reactionaries who committed suicide.

Soviet film based on Dostoevsky's autobiographical novel of his prison experiences in Tsarist days.

From his early silent works, the great Russian film director, Herr Yakov Protazanov, made literary adaptations from equally great Russian writers, as is the case with "Chiny I Lyudi" ( Ranks And People ) (1929) in which three short stories by Chekhov, "Anna On The Neck", "Death Of A Petty Official" and "Chameleon" were assembled for the silent screen.

The priests, stock market officials, and police conspire to squeeze income out of pilgrims come to see relics of a Christ like figure. A pair of con men try to pass of a resurrected saint.

A wise and forgiving communist leader decides to send a young worker, Karl Renn, as an international delegate to the Soviet Union after the worker had deserted a picket-line and had expressed doubts about the methods of class struggle in in his own country.

The Soviet Union wants more influence in Europe and decides to get more power by giving the nation of Boufferia a new king, an easy to handle drunkard, because they don't have enough power over the current king.

Working with children led Barskaya to create superb direct sound and an inspired style of shooting. Don’t look for conventional cinematic syntax here. The film is chaotic in the way that Soviet films still knew how to be, and Langlois couldn’t help but be seduced by its rebellious spirit, its anarchy and love of children, comparable to Vigo’s Zero de conduite. As well as being a film made with and for children, it offers a complex take on Western society. Pre-Nazi Germany is not named as such but is carefully reconstructed, possibly under advice from Karl Radek, and children offer a playful reflection of class struggle – doubly excluded, as proletarians and as minors. “They play in the same way that they live”, one intertitle says. The interaction between their comical games and the yet more ludicrous ones played by adults is developed on several levels.

A squad of rebels attacks a peaceful caravan, and the old guide Sho-Murad and his granddaughter Pery find themselves in captivity of the bandits. Border guards and a sheepdog Dzhulbars repulse prisoners and neutralize enemies.