Directed by Dušan Makavejev • 1964 • Yugoslavia
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The debut feature from Yugoslav cinema’s greatest iconoclast, Man Is Not a Bird announced Dušan Makavejev to the world and paved the way for the Balkan nation’s Black Wave movement. Se...

Directed by Vytautas Žalakevičius • 1965 • USSR/Lithuania

1947, the Lithuanian countryside. The village Soviet chairman Lokys has been murdered by the “Forest Brothers”: nationalist guerillas bitterly opposed to the new communist regime. Lokys’s four sons return to the village seeking vengeance,...

Directed by Rolands Kalniņš • 1967 • USSR/Latvia

The countercultural spirit of the sixties runs through this cult musical drama from Latvia, which thumbed its nose at the prevailing Soviet orthodoxy of the era and was rarely screened as a result. By day, Cēzars Kalniņš is a telephone repairman; ...

Directed by Jaromil Jireš • 1969 • Czechoslovakia
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Adapted from the breakout novel by the great Milan Kundera, The Joke is one of Czech cinema’s most piercing political statements. During the Stalinist era, happy-go-lucky student Lu...

Directed by Aleksandar Petrović • 1967 • Yugoslavia

One of the first films from Eastern Europe to explore the lives of the Roma in sympathetic detail, and to cast Romani-speaking Roma in order to do so, Aleksandar Petrović’s Cannes-winning classic builds a complex and humanistic narrative out of...

Directed by Wojciech Has • 1965 • Poland

Wojciech Has’s masterpiece of sixties counterculture is a surreal odyssey across time and space. Adapted from Jan Potocki’s picaresque novel, the film stars Polish screen icon Zbigniew Cybulski as Alphonse van Worden, an 18th-century military officer whos...

Directed by Marlen Khutsiev • 1965 • USSR/Russia

Three lifelong friends see their aspirations juxtaposed against everyday life in 1960s Moscow, reflecting on their possible futures and their place in society. At the heart of the film is Sergei, returning from military service and grappling with ...

Directed by Miklós Jancsó • 1968 • Hungary

One of Miklós Jancsó’s most potent examinations of the corrupting influence of power, Silence and Cry is set in 1919 after the fall of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic to the fascist regime of Miklós Horthy. András Kozák stars as István, a comm...

Directed by Sergei Parajanov • 1965 • USSR/Ukraine

The first mature masterpiece from one of world cinema’s true poets, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors bursts with imagination. Grounded in the folk traditions, aesthetics, and dialect of the Hutsul people of western Ukraine, Parajanov’s tale of for...

Directed by Lucian Pintilie • 1968 • Romania

Voted the greatest Romanian film of all time, Lucian Pintilie’s heady blend of political theatre and uproarious slapstick remains hugely influential to this day. George Mihăiţă and Vladimir Găitan play two students arrested following a drunken brawl a...

Directed by Lucian Bratu • 1967 • Romania

Romania’s answer to the French New Wave delights of Truffaut and Varda, this sixties cult classic is shot through with cinematic joie de vivre. Popular singer Margareta Pâslaru stars as Ruxandra, a young woman with a deficit of talent and an abundance of...

Directed by Kaljo Kiisk • 1969 • USSR/Estonia

Hailed as Estonia’s first truly modern feature film, Kaljo Kiisk’s mind-bending satire of authoritarianism and self-delusion pushed the boundaries of Soviet propriety and was banned from theatres for nearly twenty years. In an unnamed, occupied count...

Directed by Liviu Ciulei • 1965 • Romania

The Eastern Front during the First World War. Lieutenant Apostol Bologa (Victor Rebengiuc) fights on the side of the multi-ethnic Habsburg Army against the forces of his native Romania. As the absurdity of the conflict becomes impossible to ignore, and u...

Directed by Jiří Menzel • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
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The film that announced the Czech New Wave to the world, Jiří Menzel’s beloved debut is a humanist comedy of errors and a minor-key ode to rebellion. Adapted from Bohumil Hrabal’s nov...

Directed by Yuri Ilyenko • 1971 • USSR/Ukraine

Yuri Ilyenko’s landmark film follows the Zvonars, a family of poor musicians, as personal and geopolitical crises collide across the course of the tumultuous 1940s. Set in the region of Bukovina, on the border between Ukraine and Romania, Ilyenko’s ...

Directed by Borys Ivchenko • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine

A wartime melodrama shot through with the folkloric magic and vivid imagination that defined Ukraine’s so-called “poetic cinema” of the 1960s. In the dark days of Nazi occupation, a young girl native to the Carpathian mountains falls in love with ...

Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky • 1966 • USSR/Russia

Collective farmer Asya is in love with the father of her unborn child. However, he does not reciprocate, leaving her forced to choose between a loveless marriage to another suitor and single motherhood. Konchalovsky’s sparsely beautiful tale o...

Directed by Dušan Makavejev • 1967 • Yugoslavia

This gleefully subversive, formally skittish, and surprisingly moving oddity from the inimitable Dušan Makavejev is a high point of the Yugoslav Black Wave. Centred around the doomed romance between a Hungarian switchboard operator Izabela (Eva Ras...

Directed by Otar Iosseliani • 1961 • USSR/Georgia

Iosseliani’s debut follows a young couple’s search for the perfect place to share a kiss. They soon find themselves a small, sparse flat whose kitchen taps, lights and cooker flare up in appreciation of their love, though trouble soon arrives in ...

Directed by Kira Muratova • 1967 • USSR/Ukraine

The debut feature from one of Russian-language cinema’s most fearless auteurs, Brief Encounters is a quietly devastating gem. Banned for twenty years and only rediscovered in the late ‘80s, this beautifully staged domestic drama uses flashbacks to ...

Directed by Aleksandr Askoldov • 1967 • USSR/Russia

When a Red Army officer is forced to shelter with a Jewish family while seeing her unwanted pregnancy to term, she finds her fierce communist values at odds with their sprawling generosity. Over time, these two worlds are brought closer togethe...

Directed by Volodymyr Denysenko • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine

Volodymyr Denysenko’s searing partisan drama is a neglected masterpiece of Soviet Ukrainian cinema. Recounting a partisan attack on a Nazi officer and the brutal recriminations that follow, Vasyl Zemliak’s quasi-autobiographical script draws ...

Directed by Miklós Jancsó • 1965 • Hungary

In the final days of the Second World War, a young Hungarian soldier, Jóska, makes his way home through a landscape riddled with debris and destruction. After he is captured by the occupying Red Army, he forms a bond with the Russian soldier Kolya, desp...