Elizaveta Svilova

In the early years of cinema, editors were usually women. This short documentary looks at how they wielded power, and how their work was made invisible.

“The Magic Beam” is a film essay woven together from newsreels and documentary material from different decades, fragments of hundreds of non-fiction and fiction Soviet films of the 1910s-1960s.

Documentary portrait of Dziga Vertov, father of documentary cinema.

Follows the legendary female pilots Raskova, Osipenko, and Grisodubova in their failed but magnificent attempt to make the first nonstop trans-Siberian flight. Using documentary reenactments, Vertov depicts the flight, the crash, the rescue, and the women’s heroic return to Moscow, where crowds shower them with flowers, and leaders with speeches.

Follows the legendary female pilots Raskova, Osipenko, and Grisodubova in their failed but magnificent attempt to make the first nonstop trans-Siberian flight. Using documentary reenactments, Vertov depicts the flight, the crash, the rescue, and the women’s heroic return to Moscow, where crowds shower them with flowers, and leaders with speeches.

Soviet travelouge

Soviet documentary shot right after liberation of Auschwitz. It was used as evidence by the Soviet prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. In 2014, footage shot by cameraman Aleksandr Vorontsov, as well as his interview given in 1986 for German television, were included in Andre Singer’s documentary “Night Will Fall”.

Soviet documentary shot right after liberation of Auschwitz. It was used as evidence by the Soviet prosecution at the Nuremberg trials. In 2014, footage shot by cameraman Aleksandr Vorontsov, as well as his interview given in 1986 for German television, were included in Andre Singer’s documentary “Night Will Fall”.

From the start, Vertov made himself known as an irreconcilable enemy of “acted films,” which he regarded as a violation of truth. At the peak of World War II, however, such lofty artistic principles proved impractical. Vertov’s poetic and patriotic For You, Front! is a fiction film with a script and two actors. In a letter to her fiancé, a soldier on the front, Saule asks if there is anything he needs from “our beloved Kazakhstan.” Yes there is, he replies: lead, which can be used to make bullets to kill the enemies of “our beloved country.”

March 9th, 1953. A gray, sad day. Clouds float low over the Kremlin towers. A city that unrecognizably grew, prettier and matured - this Moscow froze in solemn grief. The country escorts its father and leader, Joseph Stalin.

No synopsis available yet.

A Soviet documentary chronicling the final assault on Nazi Germany’s capital. More than forty frontline cameramen from the 1st Belorussian and 1st Ukrainian Fronts captured the battle and its aftermath, supplemented with seized German footage. The film records the destruction of Berlin and the symbolic collapse of Hitler’s regime, standing as both a historical chronicle and a work of Soviet wartime cinema.

A look at the life of the Evenki people, formerly known as the Tungus, indigenous to North Asia.

This riveting Russian documentary takes you inside the trials of the notorious German war criminals, brought to trial to account for their actions. The footage includes excerpts from the trials of many of the senior Nazis including Goebels and Goring.

No synopsis available yet.