The Soviet Union's Last Stand

Film cameras cruise the Soviet Union's mighty Volga River, providing a view of the Russian people along its 2300-mile length, including looks at the fishing industry, a rural village, a manufacturing town and the wedding of two factory workers.

How in 1959, during the heat of the Cold War, the government of the United States decided to create a secret military base located in the far north of Greenland: Camp Century, almost a real town with roads and houses, a nuclear plant to provide power and silos to house missiles aimed at the Soviet Union.

In the 1930’s, the workers of the underground, headed by brigades of writers, are in charge to write in real time "the history of the Moscow Metro". Based on their narratives, partially unpublished, the film recounts the first lines construction of the most beautifiul underground in the world, in the light of this "big literary Utopia", stoped by the purges of 1937-38.

A documentary about Kim Philby, a British member of MI6 who was in reality a spy and defected to the U.S.S.R.

The final oral exam in history and social studies at one of Warsaw's high schools. The film illustrates the theatre of social life in Soviet Poland where one says different things on the stage and another behind the scenes.

Three decades after the nuclear explosion, almost everything has been said about this ecological and sanitary disaster that made Pripiat a part of History. How did the greatest industrial disaster change the course of History, disrupt global geopolitics and, directly or indirectly, redistribute the balances and power relations of the twentieth century? The world will never be the same again. By retracing the incredible battle waged by the Soviet Union against radiation, this film proposes to retrace and enlighten an extraordinary story, while exploring the historical stakes in the medium and long-term…

On March 9, 1953, Joseph Stalin was buried in Moscow in front of a million people. His funeral is that of a demi-God. Ultimate paradox for one of the greatest criminals in History who brought misfortune to his people while arousing collective admiration.

A chronicle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the bourgeois democratic February Revolution to the great socialist October Revolution and the final triumph.

The story of the 1978 World Chess Championship between the Soviet Communist Party's protege, Anatoly Karpov and the traitor and Soviet defector, Viktor Korchnoi. One of those instances in life where truth is stranger than fiction.

The story of what daily life was like in Poland under communism: private conversations, cruel interrogations, recruitment attempts, recorded and filmed with hidden devices; of how the secret services spied on every activity of ordinary citizens: nothing escaped the brutal system of control developed by the Soviets in the name of freedom.

This film discusses conditions in the Soviet Union, including party activity and influence, the shortage of consumer goods, the roles of children and women, the status of religion, and the purpose of Soviet realist art.

This FitzPatrick Miniature visits the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the largest geographically unbroken political unit in the world, covering one-sixth of the world's land mass.

Ilze Burkovska, a little girl who is obsessed with stories of World War II and will be a filmmaker in a distant future, lives in Latvia under the totalitarian boot of the Soviets and the ominous shadow of the many menaces and horrors of the Cold War.

The 1972 Olympic men's basketball final, in which Team USA suffered their first ever loss in Games competition, was one of the most controversial events in the history of both the Olympics and basketball.

Drawing on the collections of major Russian institutions, contributions from contemporary artists, curators and performers and personal testimony from the descendants of those involved, the film brings the artists of the Russian Avant-Garde to life. It tells the stories of artists like Chagall, Kandinsky and Malevich - pioneers who flourished in response to the challenge of building a new art for a new world, only to be broken by implacable authority after 15 short years and silenced by Stalin's Socialist Realism.

“There’s a bus stop I want to photograph.” This may sound like a parody of an esoteric festival film, but Canadian Christopher Herwig’s photography project is entirely in earnest, and likely you will be won over by his passion for this unusual subject within the first five minutes. Soviet architecture of the 1960s and 70s was by and large utilitarian, regimented, and mass-produced. Yet the bus stops Herwig discovers on his journeys criss-crossing the vast former Soviet Bloc are something else entirely: whimsical, eccentric, flamboyantly artistic, audacious, colourful. They speak of individualism and locality, concepts anathema to the Communist doctrine. Herwig wants to know how this came to pass and tracks down some of the original unsung designers, but above all he wants to capture these exceptional roadside way stations on film before they disappear.

The life and death of socialist architectural monsters. An epic fairy-tale in five chapters.

Through unique and candid interviews the film tells the compelling and tragic stories of the six women – last survivors of the Gulag, the brutal system of repression and terror that devastated the Soviet population during the regime of Stalin.

The explosion at Chernobyl was ten times worse than the Hiroshima bomb and was due to a combination of human error and imperfect technology. An account of the sixty critical minutes prior to the explosion of the nuclear power plant on the night of April 26, 1986.

Congrès de Tours 1920: The Birth of the French Communist Party