Guest from the Island of Freedom

Understanding The Georgian Republic

Documentary on the USSR

Fidel Castro employed a vast spy network that helped him remain in power.

Tells the story of the tragic events in Ukraine in 1932-33, the genocidal Great Famine or the Holodomor, and one Welshman's attempts to tell the world what was happening.

This is a rare look at one of the worst horror stories in the long infamous history of warfare. This series features captured German and Russian film footage, much of which has never been seen before. For decades the Cold War prevented us from looking closely at what really happened between the Russians and the Germans on the Eastern Front during World War II. More than a struggle between nations, it pitted maniacal tyrant against maniacal tyrant, evil ideology against evil ideology. The lives of tens of millions of human beings were consumed by its raging hatreds and appalling indignities. One in every ten Russians died. One in every four Poles died. Whole divisions of Italians, Romanians, Hungarians disappeared with barely a trace. An average of 17,800 people died on every single day and this, the war on the Russian German Front, lasted for 1,400 days. This series features captured German and Russian film footage, much of which has never been seen before.

"Trotsky and Mexico, two revolutions of the twentieth century" tells us of the famous Russian revolutionary asylum by President Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico.

A story to honor actor-singer-activist Paul Robeson and his contributions to today's social climate and inspire new generations to engage in the ongoing fight for justice and equality.

With the good of the people in mind, Valery Legasov, a Soviet scientist called to the scene of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, stands up to censorship behind the Iron Curtain.

Explore the inside story of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962, when the world teetered on the brink of nuclear holocaust. In the first major feature documentary on the subject, the film brings to life the three central characters - Kennedy, Castro and Khrushchev - and explores how the world's most powerful men fell into an abyss of their own making and outlines the courage and luck it took to climb out again.

A double portrait of two dictators who were thousands of miles apart but were constantly fixated on each other.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union and the failure of Communism has been symbolically documented by many tv reportages of removals of monumental public sculptures, but the citizens of Vilnius in Lithuania did the unexpected!

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Lithuania, 1941, during World War II. Hundreds of thousands of texts on Jewish culture, stolen by the Germans, are gathered in Vilnius to be classified, either to be stored or to be destroyed. A group of Jewish scholars and writers, commissioned by the invaders to carry out the sorting operations, but reluctant to collaborate and determined to save their legacy, hide many books in the ghetto where they are confined. This is the epic story of the Paper Brigade.

A different history of the Cold War: how Estonians under Soviet tyranny began to feel the breeze of freedom when a group of anonymous dreamers successfully used improbable methods to capture the Finnish television signal, a window into Western popular culture, brave but harmless warriors who helped change the fate of an entire nation.

The story of the unconditional, no-holds-barred tour of America by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, leader of World Communism and America's arch nemesis, during 13 sun-filled days in the fall of 1959.

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.

Portrait of a Russian village near Kaliningrad and its multiethnic inhabitants.

“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.

Jazz and decolonization are intertwined in a powerful narrative that recounts one of the tensest episodes of the Cold War.