Directed by Algimantas Puipa • 1983 • USSR/Lithuania

The windswept Baltic coast of Lithuania at the turn of the century. A lonely widow joins a family of three men in their homestead, half-buried by the shifting sand dunes around them. Over the years, the family suffers loss, poverty, and injust...

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 Dužan Duong • 2025 • Czechia

Billed as the first Czech “Viet-film”, this witty, touching coming-of-age tale gives voice to one of the world’s largest Vietnamese diasporas. Hanoi-born and Czech-raised, Dužan Duong draws on personal history and a host of first-time performers for his p...

Directed by Maria Rigel • 2025 • Armenia

Maria Rigel’s mercurial crime drama moves to the rhythms of the natural world, paying tribute to Armenian film icons like Sergei Parajanov. Hayk (Albert Babajanyan) is an introverted child living in the care of his aunt Narine (Lusine Avanesyan) in a remo...

Directed by Rasmus Merivoo • 2020 • Estonia

Rasmus Merivoo’s playful horror-comedy take on Estonia’s local legends is a wicked treat. The director’s own children star as Mia and Kevin, phone-addled city kids who are whisked to the countryside and left in the care of their eccentric grandmother (...

Directed by Valeri Rubinchik • 1980 • USSR/Belarus

Blending gothic chills with surreal, folkloric imagery, The Savage Hunt of King Stakh is a forgotten classic of Soviet horror. At the turn of the twentieth century, ethnographer Andrei Bielorecki (Boris Plotnikov, star of Larisa Shepitko’s The A...

Directed by Georgi Kropachyov and Konstantin Yershov • 1967 • USSR/Russia
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Based on a novella by Nikolai Gogol and famed as the first and last Soviet horror film, Viy is a cult classic rich with dark humour, startling imagery, and f...

Directed by Sándor Reisenbüchler • 1995 • Hungary

Dedicated to the memory of Fritz Lang, this rarely seen late short from Sándor Reisenbüchler offers up an eye-popping ecological vision. Moving from frantic cityscapes bursting with lurid colours and a phantasmagoria of commodities to idyllic pas...

Directed by Sándor Reisenbüchler • 1978 • Hungary

One of Sándor Reisenbüchler’s most playful and politically pointed shorts, Panic weds his familiar dazzling colour palette and engagingly naive visual style to a parable about the dangers of unchecked technology. An advanced civilisation takes th...

Directed by Sándor Reisenbüchler • 1975 • Hungary

One of the finest examples of Sándor Reisenbüchler’s psychedelic take on animation, this cult classic short reimagines science fiction by way of sixties counterculture. Two scientists propose that the moon is in fact an ancient spaceship, and tra...

Directed by Konstantin Lopushansky • 1986 • USSR/Russia

Arriving just months after the Chernobyl disaster, Konstantin Lopushansky’s post-apocalyptic prophecy is one of the final masterpieces of Soviet cinema. In a world devastated by nuclear war, a small community of survivors ekes out a life un...

Directed by Juho Kuosmanen • 2021 • Finland/Russia

Juho Kuosmanen’s transnational odd couple odyssey is an homage to a lost era of travel and connection that won the Grand Prix at Cannes. In the chaotic post-Soviet nineties, Finnish grad student Laura (Seidi Haarla) boards a sleeper train from M...

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 Jan Schmidt • 1967 • Czechoslovakia

This lesser-known gem of the Czech New Wave is a post-apocalyptic parable about the fine line between civilisation and savagery. In the aftermath of nuclear war, a stern matriarchal figure (Beta Poničanová) leads a gang of younger women across a de...

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...

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Directed by Dmytro Sukholytkyy-Sobchuk • 2022 • Ukraine

One of the most striking debuts in recent Ukrainian cinema, Pamfir is a magical realist reimagining of the gangster film imbued with folkloric vitality. When devoted family man a...

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 Klára Tasovská • 2024 • Czechia

Klára Tasovská’s immersive and intimate documentary tells the story of Czech photographer Libuše Jarcovjáková: the “Nan Goldin of Prague” whose uncompromising images of 1970s and 1980s Czechoslovakia capture a lost subcultural world of underground quee...

Directed by Danis Tanović • 2024 • Croatia

Danis Tanović, the Oscar-winning director of No Man’s Land (2001), serves up a warmly melodramatic romance set to the lazy rhythms of island life. Anja Matković both writes and stars as Maja, a Zagrebian who travels to an anonymous Croatian island to cl...

Directed by Stefan Djordjević • 2025 • Serbia

Stefan Djordjević blends fact and fiction in this tender tribute to his late mother and the enduring power of family and film. Returning to the Djordjević summer house while still in mourning, the director resurrects an abandoned documentary project ...

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 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 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 Maria Saakyan • Armenia • 2006

The debut feature from Maria Saakyan – made when she was just 27 – Mayak is a haunting account of conflict, displacement, and childhood. Anna Kapaleva plays Lena, a young woman who returns to her native village in war-torn Armenia in an attempt to convi...

Directed by Orkhan Aghazadeh • 2024 • Azerbaijan

In Soviet times, Samid worked as a village projectionist. Nowadays, the cinemas are long gone and he gets by repairing TV sets, beset with grief at the loss of his adult son. But a run-in with local teenager Ayaz, a passionate DIY filmmaker, reawa...

Directed by Elene Mikaberidze • 2024 • Georgia

In a village in northern Georgia, retired engineer Soso has decided to turn his hand to farming blueberries. Together with his wife and two sons, he throws himself into the venture in an attempt to secure a future for his family in this conflict-rav...

Directed by Elvin Adigozel • 2025 • Azerbaijan

Azerbaijani writer-director Elvin Adigozel confirms his status as a major talent in Caucasian filmmaking with this darkly funny tale of friendship and artistic ambition gone wrong. Wedding musicians in rural Azerbaijan, Babek and Sahil (Kamil Nazim ...

Directed by Anastasia Lapsui and Markku Lehmuskallio • 2000 • Finland

A groundbreaking work of Indigenous cinema, Seven Songs of the Tundra is Anastasia Lapsui’s greatest tribute to her native Nenets culture. A nomadic people native to Siberia, the Nenets found their traditional way of life disr...

Directed by Pavel G. Vesnakov • 2024 • Bulgaria

When his estranged father dies, taciturn Koko (rapper Ognyan “Fyre” Pavlov) returns to his native Bulgaria after years spent working abroad. As Koko tries to put the late man’s affairs in order, he is drawn ineluctably back into a world he thought ...

Directed by Laurynas Bareiša • 2024 • Lithuania

Lithuania’s Laurynas Bareiša establishes himself as one of the Baltics’ most promising filmmakers with this captivating and elliptical family drama. Sisters Ernesta (Gelminė Glemžaitė) and Justė (Agnė Kaktaitė) are spending a weekend away at their ...

Directed by Nina Guseva • 2021 • Russia

The summer of 2019 saw Moscow gripped by protests following attempts to block opposition candidates from standing in local elections. Nearly 3,000 demonstrators were arrested. Nina Guseva’s immersive, gut-wrenching documentary follows one defendant, Konsta...

Directed by Luka Beradze • 2023 • Georgia

During the 2012 presidential elections in Georgia, the incumbent Mikheil Saakashvili made a strange offer to citizens in the country’s neglected rural outposts: in exchange for their votes, his party would provide them with new teeth. Residents began to ...

Directed by Maria Zbąska • 2024 • Poland

Maria Zbąska’s debut film is a charmingly cynical romantic comedy about rediscovering love in the darkest (and coldest) of places. Wanda (Zofia Chabiera) and Janek (Marcin Sztabiński) have reached an impasse in their marriage. He proposes a radical soluti...

Directed by Wojciech Has • 1973 • Poland

Wojciech Has’s surrealist masterpiece is a moving and profoundly strange exploration of memory and the lost world of the Jewish shtetl. Freely adapting the short stories of the great Polish-Jewish author Bruno Schulz, Has constructs a phantasmagoria in wh...

Available from 27 November – 25 December
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 Word...

Directed by Kazimierz Kutz • 1960 • Poland

Also known as Nobody’s Calling, Kazimierz Kutz’s haunting post-war romance is a portrait of a nation on its knees and hope among the ruins. In the chaotic days after Poland’s liberation, Bożek (Henryk Boukołowski), a former resistance fighter with a dan...

Directed by Dan Pița and Mircea Veroiu • 1972 • Romania

A long-overlooked cult classic of Romanian cinema set in the rolling mountains of Transylvania, The Stone Wedding is a folkloric film poem in two parts. The first, directed by the late Mircea Veroiu, follows a widow’s travails as she toils ...

Directed by Olga and Priit Pärn • 2008 • Estonia

An alternative Valentine’s Day treat from the husband-and-wife team behind some of Eastern Europe’s most mind-bending cult animation. In twitchy, electric monochrome, the film follows the travails of a couple, Viktor and Anna, who struggle to reco...

Directed by Dmytro Moiseiev • 2024 • Ukraine

January, 2022, on the eve of the Russian invasion. Retired miners Serhiich (Viktor Zhdanov) and Pashka (Volodymyr Yamnenko) are the sole remaining residents of a Donbas village in the “grey zone” between Ukrainian and pro-Russian forces. Cut off from ...

Directed by Marko Raat • 2024 • Estonia

Marko Raat’s mysterious, mesmerising film poem transports us to the spiritual heart of Estonia by way of Japan. Inspired by the “eight views” landscape painting tradition of East Asia, Raat’s film unfolds on the seemingly idyllic shores of Lake Peipsi on t...

Directed by Alisa Kovalenko • 2023 • Ukraine

Alisa Kovalenko’s collective portrait of teenagers in the Donbas just prior to the full-scale invasion is a moving tribute to a world of opportunity now lost to military aggression. Andriy, Illia, Lera, Liza, and Ruslan have come of age in a world whe...

Directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov • 2020 • Kazakhstan

A movie-obsessed ex-con and his sultry female companion are lovers on the lam in Adilkhan Yerzhanov’s droll and touching crime caper. Kermek (Azamat Nigmanov) returns from the joint to his native Kazakh village with a dream: to build a cinema on...

Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski • 1988 • Poland
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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 Paweł Pawlikowski • 2013 • Poland

Paweł Pawlikowski’s Oscar-winning period road movie excavates the sins of Poland’s twentieth-century history. It is 1962, and Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska), an orphan given up to a convent during the war, is on the verge of taking her monastic vows. But...

Directed by Béla Tarr • 2000 • Hungary
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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 Arūnas Žebriūnas • 1969 • USSR/Lithuania

A poignant portrait of innocence and experience, Arūnas Žebriūnas’ exquisite drama captures the inner world of childhood with unusual clarity. Six-year-old Inga (Inga Mickytė) lives with her devoted but melancholy single mother (Lilija Žadeiky...

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 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 Vuk Ršumović • 2024 • Serbia

Based on real events, Vuk Ršumović’s Dwelling Among the Gods recasts the human drama of the migrant experience as a modern-day Greek tragedy. Co-written by journalist Momir Turudić and drawing on his experiences reporting on the so-called migration “crisi...

Directed by Nadejda Koseva • 2024 • Bulgaria

Nadejda Koseva’s sophomore feature is a portrait of man at war with nature and himself. On the banks of the Danube, an elderly loner named Yovo (Alexander Trifonov) tends to his private zoo. His reclusive life is upended when his dog is enlisted for a...

Directed by László Csáki • 2024 • Hungary

László Csáki’s livewire animated documentary recreates the anything-goes atmosphere of the early nineties, when borders were toppling across Europe. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, young Hungarians dreamed of finally travelling abroad – but few could...

Directed by Kristoffer Hegnsvad • 2022 • Canada

Over more than 20 years of travel across the former Soviet Union, Canadian photographer Christopher Herwig has painstakingly documented the humble bus stop. From Ukraine to Uzbekistan, the bus stop provided local architects with a canvas for indivi...

Directed by Jiří Trnka • 1965 • Czechoslovakia
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“The Walt Disney of Eastern Europe”, Jiří Trnka was one of the most influential figures in Czech animation history. This subversive allegorical short, one of his most poignant creation...

Directed by Olga Chernykh • 2023 • Ukraine

Olga Chernykh’s intimate, essayistic documentary examines the war in Ukraine through the eyes of three generations of women from a displaced Donetsk family. The director’s grandmother remains in occupied Donbas, while her mother now works in a Kyiv morg...

Directed by Grigori Kromanov • 1979 • USSR/Estonia

An eerie guesthouse high in the hills in some unnamed European country is the setting for this Soviet sci-fi/horror oddity from Estonian director Grigori Kromanov – although the film was in fact shot in the mountains of distant Kazakhstan. Like ...

Directed by Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz • 1985 • Hungary

Recalling the avant-garde artistry of Chagall and Kandinsky, as well as the folk traditions of the Carpathians, this short from master animators Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz is a fine example of the Hungarian psychedelic school. Dep...

Directed by István Orosz • 1989 • Hungary

A late socialist take on M. C. Escher from the master of the mathematical and the absurd, István Orosz. Mind the Steps! reimagines a typical apartment block in Budapest from the ever-shifting perspective of a young boy. The architecture and its inhabitan...

Directed by Richard Viktorov • 1981 • USSR/Russia

Richard Viktorov’s newly restored cult classic is one of the most striking Soviet sci-fi features. Scripted by the beloved author Kir Bulychyov, Per Aspera Ad Astra blends childlike wonder at the cosmos with the cynicism of the Brezhnev era. Elen...

Directed by Ilya Povolotsky • 2023 • Russia

An unnamed father and daughter traverse the empty roads of provincial Russia in a battered old van, eking out a living selling pirated DVDs at the impromptu screenings they mount with an onboard mobile cinema. Ilya Povolotsky’s compellingly strange deb...

Directed by Janyl Jusupjan • 2023 • Kyrgyzstan

Buzkashi is a traditional sport of Central Asia in which teams of horsemen battle to carry a goat carcass across a goal line. In this strictly gendered world, only men can play the game – but there are windows of opportunity for enterprising women. ...