Directed by Otar Iosseliani • 1970 • USSR/Georgia

This lyrical caper, shot in gorgeous, low contrast black and white, portrays 36 hours in the life of Gia: a young man still living with his mother and struggling to meet social and professional expectations. A talented percussionist in the Tbilis...

Directed by Marlen Khutsiev • 1956 • USSR/Ukraine

The feature debut of beloved auteur Marlen Khutsiev, Spring on Zarechnaya Street signalled a sea change in Soviet cinema on its release in 1956. Charting the romance between a literature teacher and a happy-go-lucky factory worker in provincial U...

Directed by Tatyana Lioznova • 1968 • USSR/Russia

Adapted from a novel by Mikhail Borgashevsky, this deceptively simple tale of the accidental meeting of rustic housewife Nurya and Sasha, a Moscow taxi driver, immediately achieved cult status on release. Tatyana Lioznova, who would go on to dire...

Directed by Leonid Osyka • 1968 • USSR/Ukraine

Western Ukraine in the 1890s. When elderly peasant Ivan Didukh decides to leave his Carpathian home in search of a better life in Canada, the village comes together to ceremonially mark his departure, understood as symbolic of the death of their old...

Directed by Yuri Ilyenko • 1971 • USSR/Ukraine

Yuri Ilyenko’s landmark film follows the Zvonars, a family of poor musicians, as personal and geopolitical crises collide across the course of the tumultuous 1940s. Set in the region of Bukovina, on the border between Ukraine and Romania, Ilyenko’s ...

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 Ali Khamraev • 1980 • USSR/Uzbekistan

Three women’s lives intersect in a small town in Uzbekistan following the war. The first is an old woman trapped in a forced marriage; the second is a schoolteacher intent on imposing progress on the remote region; the third is a young woman dete...

Directed by Henrik Malyan • 1969 • USSR/Armenia

When a petty dispute over a lost sheep gets out of hand, a group of shepherds find their mountain idyll interrupted by the long arm of the law in Henrik Malyan’s cult Soviet satire, adapted from his own work by beloved Armenian author Hrant Matevos...

Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky • 1986 • Sweden

The final film from the great Andrei Tarkovsky is a moving meditation on faith and family that builds to one of the most famous climaxes in film history. Produced in exile in Sweden with a crew of Ingmar Bergman’s closest collaborators, The Sacrifice ...

Directed by Andrei Tarkosvky • 1983 • Italy/USSR/Russia

The first film that Andrei Tarkovsky made outside of the Soviet Union, Nostalghia is one of the great director’s most wistful and intimate features. Co-written with Antonioni collaborator Tonino Guerra, the story explores the sense of dislo...