Movies: Sovkino

Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution....

Also known as The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye), The General Line illustrates Lenin’s stated imperative that the nation move from agrarian to industrial culture in an epic ode to farm-collectivization progress....

Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in....

In the short-lived Commune of Paris, a conscripted soldier falls in love with a Communard saleswoman. As the army cracks down on the revolutionaries, the soldier is forced to fight against the Commune, and the pair's love is put to the test....

Through the travelogue format, it depicts the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and details the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in or...

The rebel leader Jose Real is allowed to leave prison for one day to visit his family. But it is a ruse to make him reveal the whereabouts of his rebel gang. This existential drama disguised as a saga about the proletarian struggle presents a lonely ...

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A compilation of newsreels shot between 1913 and 1917 - the years leading up to the Russian Revolution....

Shame or Counterplan is a 1932 Soviet drama film directed by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler. The film’s title-song called "The Song of the Counterplan", composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, became world famous and was adapted into "Au-devant de la...

Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train wi...

The picture compares the fate of two heroines Anna and her lively and energetic sister-in-law Vasilisa, who openly defies the old way of life....

This SovKino production was a major early experiment in Soviet historical film about the oprichnina period of Muscovite history, combining the costumed drama and Gothic thrills of the genre with historical materialist commentary on the dialectical co...

The story of the Udege tribe, lost for centuries and on the verge of extinction, the most dangerous footage of hunting for bears and wild boars, as well as local rituals....

Since director Sergei Yutkevich was a longtime lover of American slapstick, his first films were imbued with a playfulness and cheeriness not typical of Russian cinema. And Kruzheva is a good example of that as he illustrates the friendly rivalries b...

A visual composition of the world....

Katerina Izmailova is a filmization of Dmitry Shostakovich's long-suppressed 1936 opera. Galina Vishnevskaya stars as Katerina, a bored 19th century farm wife. At the behest of her grungy lover, Katerina murders her husband and her father-in-law. She...

Chinese workers start a rebellion, arm themselves and take over the train on which they are travelling and manage to break through the frontier....

Khokhlova, a girl-reporter on a Moscow newpaper, falls in love with factory manager Petrovsky. To her he's the epitome of manliness--virile, decisive, strong-minded. Conversely, she rejects the sensitive, diffident editor Vasilchikov, who's in love w...

A young country girl who becomes an apple seller is seduced and abandoned. She finds a protector but when he is arrested for theft she finds honest work in a factory....

In a small Tatar village during the traditional holiday of the beginning of plowing, monks appear accompanied by soldiers. Trying to convert the local population to Orthodoxy by force, the monks and soldiers meet a tough rebuff from the locals. The w...