Movies: Sovkino

Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution....

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Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in....

Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train wi...

This SovKino production was a major early experiment in Soviet historical film about the oprichnina period of Muscovite history, combining the costumed drama and Gothic thrills of the genre with historical materialist commentary on the dialectical co...

Also known as The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye), The General Line illustrates Lenin’s stated imperative that the nation move from agrarian to industrial culture in an epic ode to farm-collectivization progress....

Through the travelogue format, it depicts the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and details the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in or...

The picture compares the fate of two heroines Anna and her lively and energetic sister-in-law Vasilisa, who openly defies the old way of life....

The rebel leader Jose Real is allowed to leave prison for one day to visit his family. But it is a ruse to make him reveal the whereabouts of his rebel gang. This existential drama disguised as a saga about the proletarian struggle presents a lonely ...

In the short-lived Commune of Paris, a conscripted soldier falls in love with a Communard saleswoman. As the army cracks down on the revolutionaries, the soldier is forced to fight against the Commune, and the pair's love is put to the test....

A compilation of newsreels shot between 1913 and 1917 - the years leading up to the Russian Revolution....

Shame or Counterplan is a 1932 Soviet drama film directed by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler. The film’s title-song called "The Song of the Counterplan", composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, became world famous and was adapted into "Au-devant de la...

An adaptation of Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave,” about a musician dying of hunger in his large, unheated Petersburg apartment because he was not needed in the revolutionary city....

Depicts life in the Solovki prison camp as a vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy....

Since director Sergei Yutkevich was a longtime lover of American slapstick, his first films were imbued with a playfulness and cheeriness not typical of Russian cinema. And Kruzheva is a good example of that as he illustrates the friendly rivalries b...

The story of the Udege tribe, lost for centuries and on the verge of extinction, the most dangerous footage of hunting for bears and wild boars, as well as local rituals....

A travelling circus troupe during the Civil War. A kommissar tries to transfer the wagon into an agit-prop van. The Whites conquer the town. The kommissar hides among the artists....

Chinese workers start a rebellion, arm themselves and take over the train on which they are travelling and manage to break through the frontier....

An adaptation of Pushkin's historical novel about the Pugachev's Rebellion in 1773–1774....

A boy is sitting at a table, writing a letter for Boris Prutkov. The cartoon follows the journey of this letter from Rostov to Leningrad, where its addressee Prutkov has just left for Berlin; when the letter arrives in Berlin, Prutkov has just depart...