Directed by Andrzej Wajda • 1975 • Poland

Adapted from the classic novel by Nobel laureate Władysław Reymont, Andrzej Wajda’s The Promised Land is a stunning period epic about Poland’s painful transition to industrial modernity. In late nineteenth-century Łódź, three friends – one Polish, one Je...

Directed by Jiří Menzel • 1966 • Czechoslovakia
Please note this title is not available to subscribers in the US

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 Sergei Parajanov and Dodo Abashidze • 1988 • Georgia/USSR

The exquisite final feature from Sergei Parajanov, Ashik Kerib is an intoxicating homage to the folk legends of Azerbaijan. Based on the writings of Parajanov’s beloved Mikhail Lermontov, the film relates the adventures of the...

Directed by Andrei Tarkosvky • 1983 • Italy/USSR/Russia

The first film that Andrei Tarkovsky made outside of the Soviet Union, Nostalghia is one of the great director’s most wistful and intimate features. Co-written with Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, the story explores the sense of dislo...

Directed by Dziga Vertov • 1931 • USSR/Ukraine

A radical early sound film from the grandfather of non-fiction, Dziga Vertov’s Enthusiasm captures Ukraine’s Donbas in the throes of revolutionary transformation. Vertov’s vision of industrialisation in motion verges on abstract reverie, taking the ...

Directed by Béla Tarr • 2000 • Hungary
Please note this title is not available to subscribers in the US

Perhaps the finest expression of Béla Tarr’s unique cinematic philosophy, Werckmeister Harmonies is a mysterious and gripping parable of social collapse. Adapted from his own novel The Melanch...

Directed by Aleksandar Petrović • 1965 • Yugoslavia

The first mature masterpiece from a figurehead of Yugoslav film, Three established Aleksandar Petrović at the forefront of the so-called Black Wave movement. Across a triptych of stories, we follow a soldier named Miloš (iconic actor Velimir “B...

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 Krzysztof Kieślowski • 1988 • Poland
Please note this title is not available to subscribers in the US

Expanded from an episode of Kieślowski’s epic television serial Dekalog, A Short Film about Love represents the Polish master at his most sensitive and daring. By day, 19-year-old To...

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 Andrzej Wajda • 1962 • Yugoslavia

This rarely-screened gem, produced in Yugoslavia, is one of Andrzej Wajda’s more singular films. Adapting Nikolai Leskov’s nineteenth-century novella about adultery and murder, and incorporating Dmitry Shostakovich’s riveting opera on the same source...

Directed by Sergei Parajanov and Dodo Abashidze • 1985 • USSR/Georgia

Marking Sergei Parajanov’s return to filmmaking after 15 years of imprisonment and censorship, The Legend of Suram Fortress is a dazzling reimagining of Georgian national legend. Unfolding across two mirrored storylines, one i...

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...

Please note this film is not available to subscribers in the US
Directed by István Szabó • 1980 • Hungary

Arguably the first mature masterpiece from one of Hungary’s greatest auteurs, Confidence is a perfectly controlled study in suspicion and longing. Set in a cowering Budapest in 1944, it fol...

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 Oleksandr Dovzhenko • 1930 • USSR/Ukraine

Widely regarded as Dovzhenko’s masterpiece and one of the finest silent films ever made, Earth is fiercely poetic and politically radical. Narrating the collectivisation of agriculture in the Ukrainian countryside, Dovzhenko employs avant-gar...

Directed by Corneliu Porumboiu • 2019 • Romania

Romanian New Wave icon Corneliu Porumboiu heads for the Canaries in this playful, genre-bending crime thriller. Bucharest police captain Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) is caught in a trap of his own making – under investigation by his bosses for his corrupt ...

Directed by Andrei Zvyagintsev • 2014 • Russia

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s modern masterpiece recasts the Biblical parable of Job as an epic, witheringly comic treatise on life in Putin’s Russia. On the bleakly beautiful Arctic coast, mechanic Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov) lives with his withdrawn second...

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 Aleksandr Sokurov • 1988 • USSR/Turkmenistan

In the dying days of the Soviet experiment, a young doctor finds himself posted to a remote Turkmen town. Attempting to research the relationship between religious faith and medicine, he finds his efforts confounded by a series of mysterio...

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov • 2002 • Russia

Heralded as a new Russian masterpiece on its release in 2002, Aleksandr Sokurov’s revolutionary period drama unfolds in a single unbroken take, transporting the viewer through three centuries of history as contained within St Petersburg’s famous Herm...

Directed by Emir Kusturica • 1998 • Serbia

A careening ensemble comedy bursting at the seams with music and visual energy, Black Cat, White Cat is Emir Kusturica’s madcap tribute to the marginalised and dispossessed. The film follows the twisted romances and small-time schemes of a community of ...

Directed by Dušan Makavejev • 1964 • Yugoslavia
Please not this title is not available to subscribers in the US

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...