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 Vitaliy Melnikov • 1970 • USSR/Russia

A tender family drama about the close but pained relationship between a mother and her adolescent son. Divorcee Zinaida has for years been singlehandedly raising Boris, an intelligent but highly selfish young man. When Viktor enters Zinaida’s lif...

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...

Directed by Aleksei German • 1984 • USSR/Russia

Russian auteur Aleksei German’s masterpiece journeys into the past, as an elderly man reflects on his childhood in a communal apartment in a mid-thirties provincial town. As a nine-year-old boy, he is witness to the lives of those around him – chie...

Directed by Boris Barnet • 1933 • USSR/Russia

Set in a provincial backwater on the eve of the First World War, this reflective drama from one of Soviet cinema’s most underrated directors is a milestone in Russian-language film history. One of the first notable Russian films to be shot with sound...

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...