Alas for the One through Whom the Umbrage Comes

Hong Kong, 1978. South Korean actress Choi Eun-hee is kidnapped by North Korean operatives following orders from dictator Kim Jong-il.

Over the course of one year, this film follows the life of an ordinary Pyongyang family whose daughter was chosen to take part in Day of the Shining Star (Kim Jong-il's birthday) celebration. While North Korean government wanted a propaganda film, the director kept on filming between the scripted scenes. The ritualized explosions of color and joy contrast sharply with pale everyday reality, which is not particularly terrible, but rather quite surreal.

Vítězný lid

Atentát na kulturu

Julius Fučík

A film about the experiences that Czechoslovak peasants gained on a study trip to the Soviet Union.

Made by the highly influential Russian cameraman Roman Karmen, this documentary vividly features Albanian life immediately after the communists came to power in 1944. The film is especially memorable since it’s missing much of the heavy socialist realism that marked Albanian doc making. Shortly after he completed the film, Karmen set off for Berlin to shoot the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany.

The story of Viktor Stratoberdha (1921-1991) mirrors many of Albania’s tragedies. Stradoberdha’s humorous, buoyant style led him to be one of the country’s most promising filmmakers. But after being denounced in 1956, he was expelled from the Kinostudio and sent into internal exile. In 1967, Stratoberdha directed a local theater play in which the economic five year plan was placed in a coffin. He was then jailed for the next two decades. Urime Shokë Studentë! is one of the surviving documentaries of Viktor Stratoberdha’s all too short career.

The documentary Their Kingdom, co-directed in 1928 by Nutsa Gogoberidze and Mikhail Kalatozishvili (Kalatozov) for Soviet Georgia’s Cinema Trust, was considered lost until 2008, when there appeared a possibility that this important film – Georgia’s first documentary feature and Kalatozov’s directorial debut – had not disappeared irretrievably.

Le Parti du cinéma

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

Emmy Awards nominee for "Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Research: Multi-faceted portrait of the man who succeeded Lenin as the head of the Soviet Union. With a captivating blend of period documents, newly-released information, newsreel and archival footage and interviews with experts, the program examines his rise to power, deconstructs the cult of personality that helped him maintain an iron grip over his vast empire, and analyzes the policies he introduced, including the deadly expansion of the notorious gulags where he banished so many of his countrymen to certain death.

An audiovisual symphony that delves into the industrial, agrarian, and cultural fabric of the Donbas region during the inaugural Soviet Five Year Plan. It spotlights anti-religious campaigns, propagandistic marches, and the vibrant athletic culture of its time

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.

From 1945 to 1989, after the capitulation of Nazi Germany, two rival ideologies, communism and capitalism, faced each other in a merciless battle. On one side of the Iron Curtain and on the other, throughout the Cold War, the USSR and the United States sought to shape children’s imaginations through their magazines and films. Never in the history of mankind have so many comic books been published and so many cartoons produced for young people. In November 1989, communism collapsed with the Berlin Wall; capitalism was left to decide the future of the world. What if this victory had been prepared for a long time, and our thinking conditioned, from our early childhood, to ensure this absolute triumph?

The epic story of the Russian Civil War (1918-21): the White Terror, the counterrevolutionary uprisings, the guerrilla war, the Kolchak front, the Wrangel front and the Kronstadt rebellion. Chaos and violence, devastation and death.

A film about life in the Czech borderlands after the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans.

Triedny nepriateľ

A relentless chronicle of the tragedy of the Uighurs, an ethnic minority of some eleven million people who live in the Xinjiang region of northwest China, speak a Turkic language and practice the Muslim religion. The Uighurs suffer brutal cultural and political oppression by Xin Jinping's tyrannical government: torture, disappearances, forced labor, re-education of children and adults, mass sterilizations, extensive surveillance and destruction of historical heritage.

Thirty years after the Chernobyl disaster, which occurred on the night of April 26, 1986, its causes and consequences are examined. In addition, a report on efforts to strengthen the structures covering the core of the nuclear plant in order to better protect the population and the environment is offered.