Directed by George Ovashvili • 2014 • Georgia

George Ovashvili’s award-winning drama is both a political parable and a portrait of man’s relationship with nature. In the Enguri River that divides Georgia from the disputed territory of Abkhazia, washed-up debris forms a tiny island – a lifeline f...

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 Dinara Asanova • 1983 • USSR/Russia

A former athlete leads a sports summer camp for troubled teens in this drama from Dinara Asanova. Famed for her use of improvisation, Asanova uses this chronicle of a summer to investigate the paradoxical vulnerability of these supposedly “tough” o...

Directed by Radu Jude • 2021 • Romania

Radu Jude is at his mischievous best in this striking short that sets out to tell the story of human life – from birth to old age – entirely through carefully constructed dioramas of childrens’ toys. Barbie dolls and plastic dinosaurs coexist with communist...

Directed by the Vasilyev Brothers • 1934 • USSR/Russia

This biopic of Vasily Chapaev, peasant turned mythical military hero, is perhaps the most canonical film of state-sponsored Socialist Realism. Charting Chapaev’s campaign in the Red Army during the Russian Civil War, frenetic action is juxta...

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 Gergő Somogyvári • 2023 • Hungary

Fanni is a 19-year-old trans woman kicked out by her family, Laci a 60-year-old homeless man. Together, they create their own domestic world – their “Fairy Garden” – in the woods outside Budapest. Shot over more than three years, Gergő Somogyvári’s t...

Directed by Lev Atamanov • 1952 • USSR/Russia

The Scarlet Flower is a 1952 Soviet adaptation of fairy tale classic Beauty and the Beast from master animator Lev Atamanov. Before embarking on an overseas journey, a merchant father asks his three daughters what they would like him to bring back fo...