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The crowning achievement of a career cut tragically short, Larisa Shepitko's final film won the Golden Bear at the 1977 Berlin Film Festival and came to be hailed as one of the finest works of late-Soviet cinema. In the darkest days of World War II, two partisans venture out for supplies to sustain their beleaguered outfit, braving the blizzard-swept landscape of Nazi-occupied Belarus. When they fall into German hands and come face-to-face with death, each must choose between martyrdom and betrayal, in a spiritual ordeal that raises the film's earthy drama to the plane of religious allegory. With stark, visceral cinematography pitting blinding white snow against pitch-black despair, The Ascent finds poetry and transcendence in the harrowing trials of war.

Description

A landmark of radical political filmmaking and one of the most visually dazzling films ever made, this hymn to revolution unfolds like a fever dream. Born of an ambitious partnership between the Soviet and Cuban film industries, Mikhail Kalatozov's film tells its story in four explosive vignettes of Cuban life on the edge of upheaval, as crushing exploitation and inequality push a working class toward revolt. Sergei Urusevsky's camera soars and plunges through the action while Carlos Fariñas's score drives the film's delirious momentum.

Description

Mikhail Kalatozov's visually stunning film tells four stories of life and revolution in Cuba before Castro. Its four vignettes center on a young Havana woman driven to prostitution, an aging tenant farmer, a student activist, and a peasant drawn into the uprising — a portrait of ordinary Cubans in the years before the revolution.

Description

Moscow, 1902. Theater director Konstantin Stanislavski, researching slum life for a production of Gorky's The Lower Depths, tours the notorious Khitrovka district with journalist Vladimir Gilyarovsky. When a chess-playing acquaintance of Gilyarovsky's is found bizarrely murdered, the two men turn amateur detectives — crossing paths with a fallen aristocrat known as the Countess — in Karen Shakhnazarov's historical mystery, which reimagines Conan Doyle's The Sign of Four with real figures from Russian cultural history.

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A four-person geological expedition is dropped into the Siberian taiga to search for diamonds. When the team finally locates a deposit, a raging forest fire cuts off their escape, and the geologists must fight their way through the flames to bring word of their discovery back.

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Writer-director Andrei Tarkovsky draws on episodes from his own life in this portrait of a dying man reflecting on his relationships with his parents, his wife and his son. Woven through his memories are reflections on the Russian people and their history, as one man's life is used to consider the Russian experience from the Second World War through to the end of the Stalinist period.

Description

Assol, the daughter of an impoverished sailor, grows up sustained by a storyteller's prophecy: one day a white ship with scarlet sails will come for her. In parallel, Arthur, the rebellious son of an aristocrat who dreams only of the sea, grows into a captain. Adapted from Alexander Grin's novel, a lyrical paean to dreamers, outsiders and storytellers.

Description

A colorful Russian fairy tale based on Alexander Pushkin's classic poem. While Tsar Saltan is away at war, scheming courtiers exile his young wife and newborn heir; the tsarina and Prince Guidon survive and reach a remote island, where Guidon saves the beautiful Princess Swan from an evil sorcerer and, through a series of miracles, she helps the prince reunite with his father.

Description

Red Army soldier Fyodor Sukhov, finally crossing the Central Asian desert on his way home to his wife after years of civil war, is ordered to guard the abandoned harem of the bandit chief Abdullah. When Abdullah returns to reclaim his wives, the seemingly unkillable Sukhov must defend the women in a one-man stand that made this surreal Soviet 'Red Western' one of the most beloved films in Russian cinema.