Directed by Ignas Miškinis • 2024 • Lithuania

Ignas Miškinis crafts a witty, wild, and heartfelt coming-of-age tale out of the chaos of the post-Soviet nineties. Adapted from Rimantas Kmita’s wildly popular book, The Southern Chronicles unfolds on the rough streets of Šiauliai, “the Manchester o...

Directed by Zara Jian • 2024 • Armenia

In 2022, as war rages in Ukraine and tensions mount over Nagorno-Karabakh, Armenian filmmaker Zara Jian returns to her homeland in search of artistic and political inspiration. She finds it in the creativity and bravery of Sergei Parajanov, the celebrated a...

Directed by Robert Budina • 2024 • Albania

Robert Budina’s chilly and enthralling study in corruption and collective guilt unfolds on the seemingly serene shore of Albania’s Lake Ohrid, where steely town planner Aida (Gresa Pallaska) and her husband Ilir (Arben Bajraktaraj) feather their nest wi...

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 • 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 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 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 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 László Nemes • 2018 • Hungary

László Nemes transports us into the decadent heart of late imperial high society in his hypnotic period piece follow-up to the Oscar-winning Son of Saul. In 1913, as the continent teeters on the brink of disaster, an orphaned woman named Írisz Leiter (Ju...

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 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 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 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 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...

Please note this film is not available to audiences in the US
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...

Please note this film is not available to audiences in the US
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 centur...

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 ...