The Whirligig of Life

The Last Days of Pompeii

A team of pop artists arrives in a small resort town and hopes to make money easily. But the guest performers are not given a provincial reception. Vacationing students of the theater university expose the hacks and declare a boycott against them...

Comrade Innokenti

About the initial period of the revolutionary activity of the Russian revolutionary Joseph Dubrovinsky (1877-1913, Innokenty is one of the underground nicknames of the Bolshevik), about the years of active propaganda work, a duel with the "king of the Okhrana" Zubatov, exile and the resumption of work underground.

Neva Melodies

A young designer Alyosha (Alexey Kozhevnikov) decided to write a musical review. He had already decided that the characters in this review would look like his friends Vasya and Masha, but what kind of plot should he come up with? And, reflecting on this, the author wanders through the streets of Leningrad. Vasya and Masha recently got married, and from the outside it seems that they have cloudless happiness. Meanwhile, a conflict is brewing in the newlyweds' family.

Konstantin Zaslonov

Young railroad worker, seemingly accommodating to Nazi overlords at a captured rural depot, secretly spearheads acts of sabotage against the evil occupying forces.

Song about Friendship

Fedya Yatsevich is going to a holiday home, his wife Lara - on a business trip to Zaraysk, for the whole summer. Their large apartment remains empty. At the same time, a friend of Larisa, Alesia, whom Lara persuadedto live in their apartment, was sent to the city from Zaraysk to the amateur olympiad. Fedya meets an old friend Ryhor Shemet and also allows him to live in his room, not knowing that Lara did the same with her friend. Living under the same roof, Alesya and Rygor begin to feel sympathy for each other...

Pirogov

A biopic based on the life of Russian scientist and doctor Nikolai Ivanovich Pirogov (1810-1881), famous for being the founder of field surgery.

Hamlet

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

Three Fat Men

A fairy tale film about the clever tightrope walker Tibule, who fights alongside the armorer Prospero and all the working people against the tyrants, the three Fat Men, who rule the state until the young heir Tutti comes of age. The freedom fighters are aided by the kind Dr. Gaspar and the brave acrobat girl Suok, who has to pretend to be a doll to sneak into the palace and free Prospero.

Sofya Kovalevskaya

Follows the life of the Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya.

Don César de Bazan

Based on the play of the same name by F. Dumanoir and D'Ennery about the pure and strong love of the dancer Maritana, the favorite of the poor of Madrid, and the unemployed vagabond - Grand , a courageous and noble defender of the oppressed.

Varvara's Day

Varvara and Pavel Zhdanov did not live long together. The war broke out and Pavel went to the front, and a hard, exhausting job at a metallurgical plant fell on the shoulders of a young woman...

Seekers of Happiness

During the 1920s, many impoverished Jews searching for a better life made their way to Birobidzhan, the Soviet Jewish Autonomous Region on the Chinese border. This melodrama tells the story of a Jewish family's immigration to Birobidzhan and their experiences as settlers on a collective farm in the area.

King Lear

King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.

Simple People

A 1945 Soviet war film which, along with the second part of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible was harshly criticized by Andrei Zhdanov and banned. A version of the film, released in 1956 during the Khrushchev Thaw, was disowned by director Grigori Kozintsev because the reediting was done without his participation.

The Gadfly

Italy, XIX century. The country is occupied by Austrian troops, the resistance movement is actively developing. Student Arthur Burton is involved in the activities of the underground organization “Young Italy”, envies its leader, Giovanni Bolla, and is jealous of his bride Gemma. He talks about this at a confession to a priest, as a result of which gendarmes take revolutionaries under arrest...

A Trip Without a Load

Based on the story of the same name by Sergei Antonov. The young journalist of the central newspaper Sirotkin came to the Siberian timber industry to write an essay about the glorious driver Khromov. But soon Sirotkin’s inquiring mind calculated the trick of Khromov, who, noting one kilometer in the vouchers, traveled a short route he knew only, draining the remaining gasoline from the curbside. Having revealed yet another fraud, in which the director was also involved, Sirotkin realized that he would not write an essay, but that he would be lucky with materials for the trial. This was announced by the authorities of the timber industry. Khromov himself took the journalist on the return trip...