Tag: USSR

July 29, 2025 / Animation
July 29, 2025 / Animation

This exquisite Soviet animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale tells the story of a water-dwelling maiden, Rusalochka, who trades her voice for legs after falling in love with a human prince. The story transitions between the black and white human world of Copenhagen, where tourists believe in love but not in mermaids, and the gorgeously vibrant visuals of the underwater mermaid kingdom, accompanied by Aleksandr Lokshin’s haunting music.

December 31, 2024 / Arthouse

Based on the works of the Georgian poet Vazha-Pshavela, this influential classic follows a Christian soldier in the Caucasus at the turn of the twentieth century. When he refuses to cut off his enemy’s hand, he is ostracised by his fellow villagers and sent into exile. Wandering through the wilderness in what seems like a dream, he arrives in a Muslim village, where he is sent to the top of a mountain to freeze to death.

December 25, 2024 / Animation

The film takes place in the XIX century. In a rich house come to the New Year’s tree children from rich families. A servant girl, similar to Cosette from Les Miserables by Victor Hugo, observes their holiday. After the holiday, during the cleaning of the hall, she dances with a broom instead of a partner and sees an abandoned nutcracker – a toy that was cracked with nuts and almost broke. She awakens a pity for the Nutcracker, and he comes to life and tells the main character about his past.

April 7, 2024 / Comedy

In this extremely funny satire on Soviet bureaucracy, the protagonist, a hapless author, attempts again and again to get his editors to accept his manuscript — a novel with the title “Blue Mountains or Tieshan.” The story unfolds with the inevitability of a fairy tale in which a naive hero is painfully being initiated into the ways of the world, and while the would-be author wanders through the hallways of his publishers, we in turn learn a lot about the crumbling Soviet system and the inactivity of its bureaucratic functionaries. By Hollywood standards, the film may be slow and repetitive, but it is precisely the repetition of tragicomic situations that bring the film to the heights of a Beckettian absurdity.

April 5, 2024 / Animation

A soldier in a Soviet nuclear facility finds himself trapped in a bureaucratic nightmare with no exit in sight. The surreal imagery in this cartoon from Armenfilm includes a platoon of miniature shock troopers, mutant generals and dinosaurs singing We Are the World. The sense that communism had failed to advance, and was in fact causing the Soviet Union to turn in on itself, is powerfully felt.

March 3, 2024 / Short

A railway controller and his sweetheart live in peace next to the railway tracks. Out of nowhere, an umbrella flies into their life. They try to catch it, and finally do manage to grasp it for a short moment, but it slips away and then disappears.

February 11, 2024 / Animation