The Nation
2018 ยท 65m ยท Documentary
A humorous story of a non-humorous national identity question. In globalizing Russia, the spiritual leader of the renewed Besermyan Nation and an Estonian folklore singer Masha try to save the dying Besermyan culture.
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The Russian Woodpecker
2015 ยท โ 6.2
As his country is gripped by revolution and war, a Ukrainian victim of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster discovers a dark secret and must decide whether to risk his life and play his part in the revolution by revealing it.
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Russia 1917: Countdown to Revolution
2017 ยท โ 3
Russia, 1917. After the abdication of Czar Nicholas II Romanov, the struggle for power confronts allies, enemies, factions and ideas; a ruthless battle between democracy and authoritarianism that will end with the takeover of the government by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
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In Search of Happiness
2005
Follows the lives of Boris and Masha Rak, Soviet Jews who in 1934 moved to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast.
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Snowden's Great Escape
2015 ยท โ 7.2
Tells the story of how Edward Snowden managed to evade capture by the US. For the first time Snowden tells the story of how he managed to escape so that not to have to spend the rest of his life in an American prison.
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Beyond the White
2021
In Northern Russia, a few dozen people still live in their traditional houses surrounded by water, stone, and sand. Cut off from vital infrastructure, almost forgotten by regional governance, these people have to cope with their everyday struggles.
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Russia's Mystery Files
2014 ยท โ 5
The Soviet Union was a sinister world. Now the Iron Curtain has fallen, and for the first time we can investigate those rumours.
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Kunashir
2021
Kunashir, one of the biggest islands of the Kuril Archipelago, is situated 16 kilometers from Japan. It was occupied by the Soviet army in 1945. One year later, after a short period of cohabitation, 17.000 Japanese and Ainu people who were living in the Kurils and on Sakhalin were deported to the island of Hokkaido. Since that time Japan has been demanding the return of the Kuril Islands. A peace treaty between the two countries still has not been signed.
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Cosmonauts: How Russia Won the Space Race
2014 ยท โ 7.4
When Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon in 1969, America went down in popular history as the winner of the space race. But that history is bunk. The real pioneers of space exploration were the Soviet cosmonauts. This remarkable feature-length documentary combines rare and unseen archive footage with interviews with the surviving cosmonauts to tell the fascinating and at times terrifying story of how the Russians led us into the space age. A particular highlight is Alexei Leonov, the man who performed the first spacewalk, explaining how he found himself trapped outside his spacecraft 500 miles above the Earth. Scary stuff.
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Babushka
2021
Twenty-five years after she moved away, Canadian filmmaker Kristina Wagenbauer (a participant in the 2019 Talent Lab) returns to her native Russia to visit her grandmother โ her Babushka โ with whom she spent part of her childhood, in this film brimming with tenderness and humour. The two women reflected in the mirror bear an undeniable resemblance, and each seeks to recognize herself in the other. Plumbing her memories, Wagenbauer hopes to re-establish a lost bond of intimacy and to confront the wounds of the past. Babushka has survived the Second World War, the break-up of the Soviet Union, the void that her daughter and granddaughter left behind when they moved abroad, and, more recently, the death of the love of her life. Despite all of this, she holds to life with a strong spirit of resilience.
More info โDer Geist der Biker
2014
In the summer of 2008, a butcher, a surgeon, a driving instructor, an engineer, a filmmaker and a theologian left their Saxon homeland on their motorcycles in search of adventure. We follow the group into the heart of Russia, over rough tracks and forgotten monasteries to the legendary Black Bears motorcycle club.
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Leon Trotsky: A Personality in the 20th Century
2013
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.
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PBS NewsHour: Inside Putin's Russia
2017 ยท โ 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.
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