Slavic

Гостья из будущего (Guests From the Future) is a five-part children’s science fiction television mini-series from 1985. Based on Kir Bulychev’s popular 1978 children’s book One Hundred Years Ahead, Guests from the Future became an instant classic. Produced by the prestigious Gorky Film Studio, the show featured, for its time, convincing sets depicting the far […]

The Fryderyk is the most important annual Polish music award for the modern Polish popular music industry. It’s presented in April, and is comparable to the American Grammy award. The Fryderyk was officially created in 1994 by the Polish Society of the Phonographic Industry (Związek Producentów Audio-Video, ZPAV). Presented for the first time in 1995, […]

Prisoner of the Mountains (Кавказский пленник) is a 1996 film adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s 1872 war novella “Prisoner of the Caucasus.” Directed by Sergei Bodrov (Сергей Бодров) and starring Oleg Menshikov (Олег Меньшиков), Sergei Bodrov, Jr. (Сергей Сергеевич Бодров), Dzhemal Sikharulidze (Джемал Сихарулидзе), and Susanna Mekhralieva (Сусанна Мехралиева), the film was nominated for an Academy […]

Nashestvie (Нашествие), or “Invasion,” is an annual Russian rock music festival held over a three-day weekend in the first half of July. Since launching in 1999, Nashestvie has become one of the largest open-air music festivals in Russia with a record 205,000 in attendance during the 2016 season. The first Nashestvie was organized by Nashe […]

Tangerines (Mandariinid) is a 2013 Estonian–Georgian drama film. It’s in Russian and Estonian, despite the fact that it takes place in and was filmed in Georgia. The film is about a village in Abkhazia (considered a part of Georgia or an independent republic, depending on who you ask), whose residents are mostly ethnic Estonians. The year […]

Hitchhiking Through Belarus (Аўтаспынам па Беларусі) is a contemporary Belarusian documentary TV series. Unlike most shows that air on Belarusian television, it is actually in Belarusian, as opposed to Russian. There are about 30 episodes, most about 20 minutes long; they aired from 2013 to 2016. The show aired on Belsat, Belarus’s first independent TV station. Hitchhiking follows […]

Aygul Barieva (Айгуль Бариева in Russian) is a renowned Tatar singer who’s been performing now for more than 20 years. She’s a Distinguished Artist of the Republic of Tatarstan, among many other awards. Most of her repertoire is in the Tatar language, though she occasionally performs in Russian as well. Barieva is from Kazan, the capital of […]

History of Kyrgyzstan (История Кыргызстана) is a series of cartoons telling the history of Kyrgyzstan. (I’m sure you didn’t see that one coming!) It was created in 2017. The series will ultimately consist of 20 several-minutes-long episodes, though to date (May 2017) only 11 have been released. The series’s creators have said that they are currently working […]