A thief named Egor, having served a term in prison, goes to the country to meet his pen-friend Lyuba, a kind genial village woman. Egor comes to love Lyuba sincerely. Now he has friends, work and a beloved woman, he decides to break with his criminal past and start a new life. However, his former criminal associates interfere brutally.
Tag: USSR
In the final days of World War II, a German military unit sets out to liquidate the inhabitants of a lunatic asylum. At the last minute, a German officer called Windisch arrives in civilian attire, with altogether different orders. He must find a British spy who is, according to the anonymous letter he has received, hiding amongst the patients.
Set during the first period of independence for Latvia (1918–1940), the film’s plot revolves around a shrewd business man Edgars Ceplis, who establishes a clay brick business with the aim of exporting and building on his already considerable wealth. At first a fantastic success he soon becomes aware that his empire is crumbling beneath him due to a contamination of the clay, which makes the bricks unstable. He narrowly escapes defeat, however, by manipulating those around him, successfully extracting himself from the business before anyone discovers that there is anything wrong and the company collapses under a new director.
An alien spaceship carrying a child crashes. A villager accidentally finds the injured child and decides to help him. The villagers mistake him as the villager’s illegitimate son and witness some extraordinary events.
In 1970s Yerevan, Armen, a compassionate archivist at the National Archives, spends his days helping ordinary citizens uncover forgotten truths about their past. Haunted by the human consequences of the records he handles, he becomes increasingly troubled by the way history can preserve injustice as easily as it preserves memory. As Armen struggles to reconcile his desire for truth with his concern for the people affected by it, his personal life and growing relationship with a young woman named Anahit intertwine with a profound meditation on memory, identity, and the weight of history.
A homage to Krišjānis Barons and his life’s work – to collect and catalogue Latvian folksongs or dainas, thus creating the encyclopaedia of Latvian life, a poetic reflection of the knowledge of life accumulated over the centuries. The film is based on Krišjānis Barons’ life during late 1800s and early 1900s – his childhood and youth in Latvia, studies and work in St. Petersburg and other places in Russia, his relationship with his faithful wife Dārta, and the awakening of the Latvian national self-awareness.
The first film of Latvian cinema’s “new era”, that of the Riga School of Poetic Documentary Cinema. The story of a little girl in a white dress wandering the streets of Riga in search of the flowers she has seen in a shop window was originally conceived and shot as a short film, but its documentary character is so abundant and artistically valuable that this little film became a turning point in cinema history and the beginning of a new era.
With a playful associative montage, Parajanov offers an overview of portrait paintings by Hakob Hovnatanyan, the “Raphael of Tiflis.” Combining sights and sounds from both Hovnatanyan’s paintings and 19th century Tbilisi, Parajanov’s short documentary can be seen as a direct precursor to The Color of Pomegranates (1969).