Spy (Шпион) is a Russian film released in 2012. It is based on the novel Spy Novel (Шпионский роман) by well-known Russian novelist Boris Akunin. Akunin contributed to the film’s screenplay. The film takes place in 1941, shortly before the Nazi invasion of the USSR. Nazi agents are trying to convince the Russian leadership that […]

DukhLess 2 (ДухLess 2; “Soulless 2”) is a Russian drama released in 2015, the sequel to 2012’s popular DukhLess. Sergey Minaev, the author of the book that the first DukhLess was based on, contributed to the screenplay. In the film, Max has totally changed his life and given up the high-paying career he had at […]

DukhLess (ДухLess; “Soulless”) is a Russian psychological drama released in 2012. It is based on the novel Soulless: Story of an Unreal Person (Дyxless. Повесть о ненастоящем человеке) by Sergey Minaev. The book was widely read in Russia and internationally, and producer Pyotr Anurov was interested early on in turning it into a film. The […]

Stalingrad (Сталинград) is a Russian film released in 2013. It takes place during the Battle of Stalingrad, one of the decisive battles of World War II. The battle, which was between the Soviet Union and Germany and took place from August 1942 to February 1943, resulted in almost two million casualties and was one of […]

Battle for Sevastopol (Битва за Севастополь in Russian; Незламна (The Enduring) in Ukrainian) is based on true events. It tells the story of Soviet Ukrainian Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a university student who was drafted into the Red Army after the German invasion of the USSR during World War II. As a member of the 25th Rifle […]

Russia, 1917, WWI. This is the story of the 1st Russian Women’s Battalion of Death, formed by the Russian Provisional Government in late May of 1917. When the revolution takes place in Russia during the third year of WWI, the country faces a political crisis leading to the collapse of the Russian army. The Provisional […]

There are three central issues at stake in Ordinary Fascism (Obyknovennyi fashizm, 1965): the return of fascism, the exposure of parallels between Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism, and the Soviet Union’s effacement of Jews from Holocaust representation. At the time the film was released, recycled images of Nazi crimes in previous documentaries, newsreels, and newspapers had made warnings […]

In Confession [Povinnost’, 1998] Russian director Aleksandr Sokurov explores the world of post-Soviet naval service in a lengthy, made-for-television documentary. Marked by Sokurov’s distinctive use of painterly cinematography, Confession’s visual qualities distinguish it from typical examples of documentary film. Disavowing conventional narrative structures such as plot, easily comprehensible symbolism, and transparent social commentary, Sokurov constructs a deeply personal vision […]