Alas for the One through Whom the Umbrage Comes

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.

Pravda dějin

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.

Atentát na kulturu

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

Vítězný lid

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

Le Parti du cinéma

No one knows why for certain, but from 1968 to 1973 communist Albania enjoyed a brief liberalisation in the arts. Banned books and Beatles records changed hands. Albania’s Nobel-nominated novelist Ismail Kadare wrote two of his most famed masterpieces, Kështjella (The Castle) (1970) and Kronikë në gur (Chronicle in Stone) (1971) during this period. The rock'n'roll and jazz arrangements featured in this concert documentary were the pretext that brought about the end to the artistic thaw. Several performers seen in the festival were sent to prison or internal exile. The portly, smiling music conductor, Gasper Çurçia, was later accused of forging bus tickets and executed.

Triedny nepriateľ

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.

Un Pic pour Lénine

A lyrical documentary on the lives of Coal miners in the Donbass who are struggling to meet their production quotas under the Five Year Plan.

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.

It’s Not Always Cloudy

"No film may throw ridicule on any religious faith..." So began Article VIII of the Hollywood Production Code, a series of ethical guidelines that for forty years helped the motion picture industry produce many of the greatest and most family-friendly films in history. That was then, however, this is now. A revered "historical" movie quietly takes every opporturnity to lie and twist the facts in order to make Christians appear as backward, foolish hypocrites. An actress jumps at the chance to play a Christ-hating role, saying, "I'm an atheist, so it was a joy." One of Hollywood's most respected directors films a passion play written by a disciple of Friedrich Nietzsche, the father of the "God is dead" movement. Not surprisingly, the movie's Jesus helps crucify people and later confesses that satan is inside him. A media mogul states that "Christianity is a religion for losers."

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.

冰血长津湖

But what is the Church of Satan? Who is Anton LaVey? Where is he from? Why does he do that? It does not take much to imagine the worst. Orgiastic ceremonies, where one revels in the blood of virgins, moonlight lamb sacrifices, noise concerts in the basement of a historical building… No, really nothing that amusing among the activities in the Church of Satan. Anton LaVey is nothing like a horned Charles Manson, and his path is all the more unexpected. Nick Bougas allows us to discover the artist, the musician, the philosopher, all through hallucinatory images retrieved from archives, making this rare documentary only two years before the author of the Satanic Bible disappeared.