Directed by Dito Tsintsadze • 2001 • Germany/Georgia

Dito Tsintsadze’s anarchic hitmen caper offers a delirious account of life on the fringes of the diaspora. Unfolding in the sedate German city of Mannheim, Lost Killers sees a gang of illegal immigrants go to ludicrous lengths in a frantic bid...

Directed by Dover Kosashvili • 2001 • Israel

Set in Tel Aviv’s Judeo-Georgian community and performed in their unique dialect, Dover Kosashvili’s black comedy of arranged marriage shines a light on a rarely represented culture at war with itself. 32-year-old philosophy student Zaza (Lior Ashkena...

Directed by Darezhan Omirbaev • 2001 • Kazakhstan

A metacinematic exploration of the anxieties, creativity, and delusion that drive the film director, The Road is one of the most personal films in the career of a Kazakh screen legend. Amir Kobessov (played by famous Tajik director Jamshed Usmono...

Directed by Kamila Kuc • 2021 • Poland/Abkhazia

Kamila Kuc’s radically empathetic exploration of the de facto Black Sea state of Abkhazia raises profound questions about displacement, memory, and trauma. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a brutal war between separatist Abkhazia and the Geo...

Directed by Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov • 1991 • USSR/Tajikistan

This restoration of the debut feature from Bakhtyar Khudojnazarov, the director who put Tajik cinema on the international map, is a gem of Central Asia film from the very end of the Soviet era. This Huckleberry Finn-style adventure foll...

Directed by Šimon Holý • 2022 • Czechia

One of the most striking new voices in Czech cinema, Šimon Holý returns with a touchingly comic take on female connection. Desperate for a way out of her loneliness, 60-something Kristýna (Pavla Tomicová) sets out for the Vysočina mountains to visit a fort...

Directed by Inna Sahakyan • 2022 • Armenia

Inna Sahakyan’s exquisite and heartbreaking animation retraces the scarcely believable biography of Aurora Mardiganian: a survivor of the Armenian Genocide who became a silent movie star. After surviving the infamous “death marches”, Mardiganian fled fr...

Directed by Miroslav Antić • 1971 • Yugoslavia

Acclaimed poet turned filmmaker Miroslav Antić made his indelible contribution to the Yugoslav Black Wave with this apocalyptic tale of love among the ruins of war and natural disaster. Set in 1947, the film captures life in a Vojvodina village duri...

Directed by Salomé Jashi • 2016 • Georgia

Dariko and Khaka are the husband-and-wife team behind Jikha TV: an ultra-low-budget local news station in the remote Georgian town of Tsalenjikha. The pair run the station out of their own home, chasing down stories with a sense of professional pride tha...

Directed by Anna Kazejak • 2022 • Poland

Anna Kazejak’s caustic satire is a worthy addition to the canon of holidays-gone-wrong classics. A weekend camping trip on the beautiful Danish island of Bornholm quickly goes south for two couples and their children in the wake of a boyish prank taken to...

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Directed by Miodrag Popović • 1968 • Yugoslavia

Renowned painter turned filmmaker Miodrag Popović made his indelible contribution to the Yugoslav Black Wave with this harsh but humanist take on the psychic scars of war. Two brothers, Isidor (Jovan Janićijević-...

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 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 Arman Manaryan • 1971 • USSR/Armenia

Adapted from one of the most celebrated works of 20th-century Armenian literature, Arman Manaryan’s soulful classic reflects on love lost and the ties that bind. Following the death of his beloved but unfaithful wife Heghnar, sculptor Mkrtich (Arm...

Directed by Comes Chahbazian • 2022 • Armenia/Belgium

A haunting evocation of the distorting effect of war on a small community, Comes Chahbazian’s Notre Village (“our village”) is a vital document of life in the disputed region of Artsakh. During the chaos of the First Karabakh War in the early...

Directed by Daniel Kötter • 2022 • Armenia/Germany

Daniel Kötter’s documentary road movie journeys through the stunning but troubled mountain landscape of eastern Armenia in an attempt to unravel the relationship between war, displacement, and extractivism. Centred around the Sotk gold mine, occ...

Directed by Michael Aloyan • 2023 • Armenia

Michael Aloyan’s quietly provocative short lifts the lid on the simmering tensions lying just beneath the surface of domestic life in the Armenian diaspora of Los Angeles. During a family gathering, two boys embark on a series of escalating games that ...

Directed by Kote Kalandadze • 2022 • Georgia

The debut feature from renowned alternative musician Kote Kalandadze, The Drummer is a gritty, heartfelt portrait of creativity and desperation on the margins of modern Georgian society. Niko (Lasha Tskvitinidze) is an aspiring rock drummer in a crumb...

Directed by Ena Sendijarević • 2019 • Bosnia and Herzegovina/Netherlands

Dutch-Bosnian director Ena Sendijarević concocts a summery but unsentimental coming-of-age drama out of the fault lines between Western and Eastern Europe in this award-winning feature. Born and raised in the Netherlands, A...

Directed by Milko Lazarov • 2018 • Bulgaria/Sakha Republic

A striking example of contemporary Sakha film – from a Bulgarian director. Milko Lazarov’s minimalist parable of generational conflict and the place of tradition in a shifting world stars Sakha screen and theatre veterans Mikhail Aprosim...

Directed by Adilkhan Yerzhanov • 2018 • Kazakhstan

Kazakhstan’s king of the offbeat and the absurd, Adilkhan Yerzhanov is at his lyrical best in this tale of innocence corrupted. When her father commits suicide, country girl Saltanat (Dinara Baktybayeva) is forced to travel to the city in search...

Directed by Kaltrina Krasniqi • 2021 • Kosovo

Kaltrina Krasniqi’s portrait of female resilience is one of the most vital Kosovan films of recent years. Vera (Teuta Ajdini Jegeni) is a middle-aged sign language interpreter whose life is thrown into disorder by her husband’s sudden suicide. A seri...

Directed by Juraj Lerotić • 2022 • Croatia

Juraj Lerotić writes, directs, and stars in this acutely moving family drama. Unfolding over 24 hours, Safe Place sees Bruno (Lerotić) and his mother (Snježana Sinovčić Šiškov) battle against a dysfunctional healthcare system and their own demons as the...

Directed by Drahomíra Vihanová • 1964 • Czechoslovakia

This striking short from Drahomíra Vihanová is an unjustly neglected gem of the Czech New Wave. Julian Dìaz stars as Fati, an African piano student at the Prague Academy, preparing for his first solo recital in the face of profound personal ...

Directed by Yuliya Sergina • 2021 • Russia

Yuliya Sergina’s debut documentary charts the unlikely, unruly rise of Viktor Toroptsev, a disgruntled taxi driver-turned-vlogger from the crumbling city of Amursk in Russia’s far east. Sergina’s fittingly rough-and-ready camera captures both the humour...

Directed by Jan Švankmajer • 1990 • Czechoslovakia

Czech animator Jan Švankmajer is a living legend, his alternately grotesque, heartfelt, and hilarious creations influencing a generation of artists. In this satirical short, commissioned by the BBC shortly after the Velvet Revolution had brought...

Directed by Sergei Dvortsevoy • 1998 • Russia

Once a week, a passing train delivers bread to the isolated population of Township No. 3, a dilapidated hamlet outside of St Petersburg. And every week, the ailing pensioners who now populate this abandoned labour commune push the decoupled carriage ...

Directed by Agnieszka Holland • 2017 • Poland

Two of Poland’s cultural titans join forces as veteran auteur Agnieszka Holland adapts Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk’s Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead into a propulsive eco-thriller. Agnieszka Mandat is magnetic as Duszejko, an animal ri...

Directed by Alex Kvatashidze • 2016 • Georgia

Georgian photographer and journalist Alex Kvatashidze searches for meaning in the tragedies and triumphs of his life in this reflective documentary about the men and women who make war their livelihoods. From his naive initial decision to follow a Fr...

Directed by Aktan Arym Kubat • 2022 • Kyrgyzstan

The latest feature from a modern master of Krygyz film, This Is What I Remember is a quiet reckoning with a life lived in self-imposed exile. The director himself stars as Zarlyk, an elderly man who returns to his home village after years spent as...

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 Hamo Bek-Nazaryan • 1928 • USSR/Armenia/Azerbaijan

To celebrate the centenary of Armenian film, we present a new restoration of this neglected silent classic by Hamo Bek-Nazaryan, the founding father of the nation’s cinema. A co-production of the Armenian and Azerbaijani national stu...

Directed by Ihor Ivanko • 2022 • Ukraine

In the 1960s and ‘70s, films shot by Ukrainian cinematographer Leonid Burlaka for the Odesa Film Studio were known to millions across the USSR. Today, suffering with Alzheimer’s, he has lost touch with these past glories, his work scattered throughout dis...

Directed by Kristīne Briede and Audrius Stonys • 2018 • Latvia/Lithuania

Acclaimed documentarians Kristīne Briede and Audrius Stonys honour their cinematic heritage in this meditative essay film about the “poetic documentary” school that came to define Baltic filmmaking. Emerging in the Soviet 1...

Directed by Călin Peter Netzer • 2017 • Romania

From Berlinale-winning director Călin Peter Netzer (Child’s Pose), this intricate and intimate dissection of a long-term relationship is one of the most striking Romanian films of the 2010s. Charting the heady highs and agonising lows of the romanc...

Directed by Radu Jude • 2018 • Romania

Radu Jude’s incendiary assault on nationalist myth-making and historical hypocrisy represents a high point in one of Romanian cinema’s most compelling careers. This meta-fictional film follows theatre director Mariana (Ioana Iacob) as she attempts to stage...

Directed by Dalibor Matanić • 2015 • Croatia

Dalibor Matanić weaves together three tales of love across the ethnic divides of the former Yugoslavia in this Cannes-winning drama. Structured as three distinct narratives each set a decade apart in the same two Dalmatian villages, the strands of The...

Directed by Agnieszka Smoczyńska • 2018 • Poland

Two years after she wandered up the railway tracks into Warsaw’s main train station, an anonymous amnesiac woman who calls herself Alicja is unexpectedly reunited with her lost family. But the anarchic, free-spirited woman who arrives on their doo...

Directed by Angelina Nikonova • 2011 • Russia

Marina (co-writer Olga Dykhovichnaya) lives a stable, prosperous, and somewhat boring life with a husband and a job as a social worker. Everything changes, however, when a violent sexual assault turns her life on its head, transforming her into a “tw...

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Directed by Cristi Puiu • 2010 • Romania

After bringing international acclaim to the Romanian New Wave with The Death of Mr Lăzărescu, Cristi Puiu returned with this stunning and enigmatic portrait of urban unease and masculinity in crisis. The director himsel...

Directed by Miroslav Terzić • 2019 • Serbia

Based on true events, Miroslav Terzić’s Stitches reckons with a forgotten trauma from the time of Yugoslavia’s collapse. Ana (a remarkable Snežana Bogdanović) is a Belgrade seamstress who is haunted by the loss of her stillborn son 18 years previousl...

Directed by Ralitza Petrova • 2016 • Bulgaria

Ralitza Petrova’s uncompromising portrait of Bulgarian society’s spiritual decline is one of the most vital films to emerge from the Balkans in the last decade. First-time actor Irena Ivanova is impassively impressive as Gana, a social care nurse who...

Directed by Vakhtang Tabliashvili and Shalva Gedevanishvili • 1948 • USSR/Georgia

Georgia’s first musical, Keto and Kote is a baroque love story about the triumph of youth and ingenuity over cynicism and greed. Keto (Medea Japaridze), the daughter of a rich merchant from Tbilisi, and Kote (Batu ...

Directed by Zaza Khalvashi • 2017 • Georgia

The final film completed by veteran director Zaza Khalvashi before his death in 2020, Namme is a meditation on tradition and modernity that makes exquisite use of Georgia’s mountain landscapes. At its heart, this is a family drama, centred on ageing pa...

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Directed by Eldar Shengelaia • 2017 • Georgia

Shengelaia’s first film for 21 years is a late-career return to form that picks up the threads of his earlier satires and reconfigures them for the modern day. Minister for Refugee Evictions Giorgi Mchedlishvili (N...

Directed by Eldar Shengelaia • 1973 • USSR/Georgia

Shengelaia’s most surreal feature, the suitably-titled Eccentrics spins the tall tale of Ertaoz (Demno Jgenti), an orphan who goes to jail for the sake of his lover. There he encounters renegade prisoner and latter-day Da Vinci, Qristopore (Vasi...

Directed by Eldar Shengelaia and Tamaz Meliava • 1963 • USSR/Georgia

Eldar Shengelaia’s first mature feature, co-directed with Tamaz Meliava, is a forceful, poetic take on the timeless conflict between the countryside and the city, reminiscent of Murnau’s silent classic Sunrise. The tragic plot ...

Directed by Radu Ciorniciuc • 2020 • Romania

Filmed over four years, Radu Ciorniciuc’s profoundly empathetic and engaged documentary explores the true costs and rewards of a life lived off the grid. The Enaches – stern, anti-establishment patriarch Gică, wife Niculina, and their nine children –...

Directed by Kateryna Gornostai • 2021 • Ukraine
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A stunning addition to the canon of coming-of-age dramas, Kateryna Gornostai’s debut film is a tender and authentic portrait of teenagers in contemporary Ukraine, produced shortly bef...

Directed by Adam Koloman Rybanský • 2022 • Czechia

Broňa and Standa are volunteer firefighters and drinking buddies in a small Czech village where opportunities for heroism are few and far between. A traffic accident during the community’s Easter celebrations gives the duo a case to investigate ...

Directed by Srdjan Dragojević • 2021 • Serbia

Cult director Srdjan Dragojević returns with this belligerent and typically Balkan black comedy of belief and disillusionment. Tracing the story of a single family across three stories that span 30 years, Heavens Above explores the notion of miracles...

Directed by Miloš Pušić • 2022 • Serbia

A punkish slap in the face of good taste, Miloš Pušić’s blue collar satire takes aim at the degradations and manipulations of the profiteers who grease the wheels of everyday urban decay. Businesswoman Lidija (Jasna Đuričić, the breakout star of Jasmila Žb...

Directed by Olmo Omerzu • 2018 • Czechia

Czech-Slovenian director Olmo Omerzu burnished his reputation as one of Central Europe’s leading lights with this seasonal tale of misadventure and self-discovery. Shaven-headed, boastful Marek (Tomáš Mrvík) and his doleful younger companion Heduš (Jan Fr...

Directed by Lauri Randla • 2020 • Estonia

Described by director Lauri Randla as “the Soviet Amélie”, this popular coming-of-age story captures the absurdity and the poignancy of late Soviet life. Set in Leningrad 3, a small Estonian town complete with a secret nuclear facility, the film follows ...

Directed by Ioseb “Soso” Bliadze • 2022 • Georgia

One of the breakout hits of recent Georgian cinema, A Room of My Own is a quietly revolutionary take on female friendship and the passage to self-emancipation. Co-writer Taki Mumladze stars as Tina, a shy young divorcee with a troubled past who f...

Directed by Andrzej Munk • 1958 • Poland

One of only three feature films completed by Andrzej Munk before his tragic early death in a car accident, Eroica is a scathing assault on the false pieties of national pride and a key film in the history of the Polish School. The film is structured as tw...

Directed by Wojciech Has • 1958 • Poland

Also known in English as Lidia Ate the Apple, Wojciech Has’s melancholic adaptation of Stanisław Dygat’s novel evokes the despair pervading Poland in the years before and after the Second World War. In 1939, bourgeois student Pawel (Tadeusz Janczar) rebel...

Directed by Emanuel Pârvu • 2021 • Romania

The sophomore directorial effort from renowned Romanian actor Emanuel Pârvu, Mikado is a taut family drama that recalls the high points of the country’s celebrated New Wave cinema. While visiting her boyfriend at a local oncology ward, teenager Magda (A...

Directed by Karel Steklý • 1956 • Czechoslovakia

Of the many screen adaptations of Jaroslav Hašek’s beloved novel, this delightful farce is the most enduringly popular. Written and directed by the redoutable Karel Steklý and with Rudolf Hrušínský excelling in the titular role, The Good Soldier Š...

Directed by Aysulu Onaran • 2022 • Kazakhstan

A coming-of-age drama that doubles as a parable of sexual liberation, Balaban shines a light on the margins of Kazakh society. Aysulu Onaran’s debut feature is inspired by a real-life scandal: in 2006, 160 Kazakh children were infected with HIV follo...