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 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 • 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 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 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...

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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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 Sybilla Tuxen • 2023 • Russia/Denmark

Danish documentarian Sybilla Tuxen’s intimate and expansive portrait of youth on the edge in modern Russia asks urgent questions about political agency and personal freedom. Following three young women – Alika, Alyona, and Katya – as they attempt...

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 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 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 ...