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 Andrei Zvyagintsev • 2014 • Russia

Andrei Zvyagintsev’s modern masterpiece recasts the Biblical parable of Job as an epic, witheringly comic treatise on life in Putin’s Russia. On the bleakly beautiful Arctic coast, mechanic Kolya (Aleksei Serebryakov) lives with his withdrawn second...

Directed by Ivan Aksenchuk • 1968 • USSR/Russia

This exquisite Soviet animated adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s 1837 fairy tale tells the story of a water-dwelling maiden, Rusalochka, who trades her voice for legs after falling in love with a human prince. The story transitions between th...

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 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 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...