Gulag

The extraordinary life and career of the Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov, a brilliant and charismatic, but also rebellious, favorite son of the Soviet Union.

On September 1st, 1939, Nazi Germany invades Poland, unleashing World War II. On September 17th, the Soviet Red Army crosses the border. The Polish army, unable to fight on two fronts, is defeated. Thousands of Polish men, both military and government officials, are captured by the invaders. Their fate will only be known several years later.

A shock wave started as Stalin's daughter Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva fled to the West. During her childhood, she remained at the center of power and was her father's favorite child. However, her life was overshadowed by death and violence. Her mother and brother died, family members were murdered, and her partner was exiled by Stalin. The Iron Curtain was an obstacle in her family dream. This documentary shows for the first time interviews with friends and relatives, exclusive photos and documentation, as well as the last and never broadcast interview with Alliloejeva.

A dying man in his forties recalls his childhood, his mother, the war and personal moments that tell of and juxtapose pivotal moments in Soviet history with daily life.

The forest in Bykovnia near Kyiv hides the remains of more than 30,000 NKVD victims, including several thousand Poles. In 2006, a team of Polish archeologists, with the cooperation of the Ukrainian side, conducted exhumation work there, which confirmed that Poles were buried in the cemetery. At the time, two people whose fathers are believed to be buried there also came to the Bykovsky forest. The film tells the story of the history of the place, the local residents' perception of it, and the search for the fathers' graves.

An account of the revolutionary years of the legendary American journalist John Reed, who shared his adventurous professional life with his radical commitment to the socialist revolution in Russia, his dream of spreading its principles among the members of the American working class, and his troubled romantic relationship with the writer Louise Bryant.

In the late 1980s, an era of great hopes and great disasters for Russia, art proved to be a social barometer, predicting the imminent political upheavals. This film's screenplay was written overnight in February 1991, soon after the World Economic Forum, where Olga Sviblova was asked the question, "What will happen to Russia?", and answered: "A putsch."

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…

A small band of multicultural convicts stages a daring escape from a WWII-era Siberian gulag, and embarks on a treacherous journey across five countries in a desperate race for freedom and survival.

Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.

Zurich, 1905. Nineteen-year-old Russian Sabina Spielrein is put by her parents in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from a severe form of hysteria and refusing to eat. A compassionate doctor, Carl Gustav Jung, takes her under his care and, for the first time, experiments with the psychoanalytical method of his teacher Sigmund Freud. Thus is born a sweeping story of love and passion, of body and soul, soaring to the utmost heights, but also plunging to the darkest depths of the 20th century.

As Russian writer Boris Pasternak (1890-1960) thinks it is impossible that his novel Doctor Zhivago is published in the Soviet Union, because it supposedly shows a critical view of the October Revolution, he decides to smuggle several copies of the manuscript out of the country. It is first published in 1957 in Italia and the author receives the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958, which has consequences.

An account of the peasant turned mythical military hero Vasily Chapayev, charting his campaign in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War.

Petrograd, Soviet Union, 1920s. Boris Letush, devastated by a personal tragedy, feels the need to put his conscience and his principles before the demands of the cruel system he serves, where law and justice are systematically ignored.

A disturbing chapter in Russian history is explored in this documentary. In 1933, Joseph Stalin sent 6000 "unwanted" citizens of Moscow and Leningrad to a desolate Siberian island - with no food or clothes to speak of. Decades later this documentary returns to the island.