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 […]

Viy (Вий) is the 2014 adaptation of the Soviet Russian horror film from 1967. The original film was in turn loosely based on the short story of the same name by Nikolai Gogol, published in 1835. The new film was released as Forbidden Empire in some English-speaking countries. The film takes place at the start […]

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 […]