Solovki
1929 · 79m · Documentary
Depicts life in the Solovki prison camp as a vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy.
More Like This

Lenin and the Other Story of the Russian Revolution
2017 · ★ 7.5
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, is remembered as the instigator of the October Revolution of 1917 and, therefore, as one of the men who changed the shape of the world at that time and forever, but perhaps the actual events happened in a way different from that narrated in the history books…
More info →
The Invisible Front
2014 · ★ 5.8
Between 1944–1953, courageous resistance movement took place in the Baltic region of Europe, uniting the partisan troops for struggle against the Soviet Union. “The Invisible Front” was a coded name used by the Soviet Interior forces to describe the resistance movement in Lithuania. Film depicts the story of the fighters through the words and experience of the partisan leader, Juozas Luksa, and interviews with eyewitnesses of those events - both the partisans and the Soviet fighters. Tales of horror, torture and courage are told in the rare archival footage that has never been screened before, and interviews with the surviving members of the resistance movement.
More info →
Mr. Nobody Against Putin
2025 · ★ 7.4
As Russia launches its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, primary schools across Russia’s hinterlands are transformed into recruitment stages for the war. Facing the ethical dilemma of working in a system defined by propaganda and violence, a brave teacher goes undercover to film what’s really happening in his own school.
More info →
If War Comes Tomorrow
1938 · ★ 4
The propaganda documentary about the readiness of the Red Army to repulse any enemy is based on documentary shots taken during the real maneuvers of the Red Army. Armadas of tanks, immense columns of infantry, dozens of fighters and bombers, thousands of cavalry, legendary divisions of the Civil War. The film glorifies Soviet military power and shows the Soviet people what the war will be like when the imperialists attack the USSR — quick, victorious, almost bloodless.
More info →
The Gulag Archipelago: The Book That Changed Russian History
2023 · ★ 8.2
The story of Russian writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918-2008) and his masterpiece, The Gulag Archipelago, published in Paris in 1973, which forever shook the very foundations of communist ideology.
More info →
A Very Animated War
2021 · ★ 6.7
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?
More info →
PBS NewsHour: Inside Putin's Russia
2017 · ★ 10
Correspondent Nick Schifrin and producer Zach Fannin take us inside Vladimir Putin's Russia, with an in-depth look at the resurgent national identity, the government's propaganda machine, the risk of being a Kremlin critic and much more.
More info →
Letter from Masanjia
2019 · ★ 8.2
Damascus, Oregon, United States. Julie Keith finds a baffling message hidden in a pack of decorative items, a desperate plea for help, written by someone imprisoned in a Chinese labor camp called Masanjia…
More info →
Salt for Svanetia
1930 · ★ 6.7
An ethnographic treasure that documents with visual bravado the harsh conditions of life in the isolated mountain village of Ushkul.
More info →The Letter to a Chinese Friend
1969 · ★ 6.5
Film by Aleksandr Medvekin to a metonymic Chinese friend, advocating against Mao and the Ussuri River Skirmish.
More info →
Coming Home
2014 · ★ 7.3
Lu and Feng are a devoted couple forced to separate when Lu is arrested and sent to a labor camp as a political prisoner during the Cultural Revolution. He finally returns home only to find that his beloved wife no longer remembers him.
More info →
Papillon
1973 · ★ 7.8
A man befriends a fellow criminal as the two of them begin serving their sentence on a dreadful prison island, which inspires the man to plot his escape.
More info →