Gulag

Special care has been taken by International Historic Films to assemble this monumental documentary, which tells the story of what is left for a people after its land has been ravaged by war. Situated between the powerful antagonists Germany and the Soviet Union, the Baltic nations of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia bore witness to some of the most ferocious land battles of the Second World War.

The documentary tells two very different human fates in the 1920s Soviet Union. Nikolai Vavilov was a botanical genius, Trofim Lyssenko was an agronomist who made great promises and fake inventions. Each of them tried to solve the country's nutritional problem, but only one succeeded.

Jonathan Stavleu explores, in a stream-of-consciousness video essay, the relationship people have with water and what happens when access to it is taken away. For this work, he examines anecdotal histories he has heard from Estonians, as well as stories from his own family history in the Netherlands, weaving them together into a journal-like narrative.

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.

2019 marks the 30th year since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Rich Hall examines the relationship between the West and the USSR in his inimitable fashion.

Monstrum

“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.

Early documentary about the Moscow metro: the early project, the development and the people working on it.

Captured by the Red Army during World War II, Hungarian soldier András Toma was admitted to a Soviet psychiatric hospital. After disappearing from prisoner-of-war records, he was presumed dead in Hungary. Because his name was incorrectly recorded in medical documents and he spoke only Hungarian—mistaken by staff for incoherent speech—Toma spent decades misunderstood and isolated in the institution. Fifty-three years later, a visiting Slovak doctor recognised his language, triggering an investigation by Hungarian authorities. Toma was repatriated in 2000, believed to be the last prisoner of war from World War II to return home.

This 1982 film explains the KGB infiltration of America. Who they are, what they are doing, and how well they have infiltrated North America.

Compilation short film about the Communist Revolution and Soviet Union.

Wes Hurley's autobiographical tale of growing up gay in Soviet Union Russia, only to escape with his mother, a mail order bride, to Seattle to face a whole new oppression in his new Christian fundamentalist American dad.

Oľga Ondreičková is one of the exceptional figures of the first generation of Slovak architects. Her work is characterized by pragmatism, simplicity, and monumentality. Her husband is architect Pavel Ondreička, with whom she collaborated on several projects, as well as on the design of furniture, interiors, and artistic decorations. At the height of her career, Oľga Ondreičková led her own project team, which was rare for a woman at that time.

Documentary recounting the story of the Cuban Revolution and its impact on the young people of Cuba.

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.

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.

January 1953: On the eve of his death Stalin finds himself yet another imaginary enemy: Jewish doctors. He organizes the most violent anti-Semitic campaign ever launched in the USSR, by fabricating the "Doctors' Plot," whereby doctors are charged with conspiring to murder the highest dignitaries of the Soviet Regime. Still unknown and untold, this conspiracy underlines the climax of a political scheme successfully masterminded by Stalin to turn the Jews into the new enemies of the people. It reveals his extreme paranoia and his compulsion to manipulate those around him. The children and friends of the main victims recount for the first time their experience and their distress related to these nightmarish events.

Leon Trotsky is considered one of the most controversial revolutionary figures of his time. Was he a practical revolutionary or a naive idealist? On the practical side, he was the mastermind behind the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, and was totally ruthless during the ensuing Civil War. As an idealist, he was committed to the pursuit of international revolution, but created many political enemies. After Lenin's death, Trotsky lost in a power struggle with Stalin, and later was expelled from the Communist Party. Trotsky was exiled from the Soviet Union, eventually finding refuge in Mexico. In 1940, Stalin ordered his assassination, and Trotsky died after being struck in the head with an ice-pick. History records that Trotsky was a master theoretician, a skillful propagandist and a brilliant orator.

This film examines Trotsky, the revolutionary; venerated and reviled, loved, hated, feared. Archive material compiled from all over the world, citations and new shoots create an electrifying proximity to the historical person and to the man Leo Trotsky. Stages in his life and eventual flight are carefully examined, from St. Petersburg, to Mexico City. This is the riveting political biography of the Revolution's onetime hero.