Movies: Sovkino

Also known as The Old and the New (Staroye i Novoye), The General Line illustrates Lenin’s stated imperative that the nation move from agrarian to industrial culture in an epic ode to farm-collectivization progress....

Sergei M. Eisenstein's docu-drama about the 1917 October Revolution in Russia. Made ten years after the events and edited in Eisenstein's 'Soviet Montage' style, it re-enacts in celebratory terms several key scenes from the revolution....

In the short-lived Commune of Paris, a conscripted soldier falls in love with a Communard saleswoman. As the army cracks down on the revolutionaries, the soldier is forced to fight against the Commune, and the pair's love is put to the test....

Life changes for a Moscow couple after they allow an old friend of the husband’s to move in....

Through the travelogue format, it depicts the multitude of Soviet peoples in remote areas of USSR and details the entirety of the wealth of the Soviet land. Focusing on cultural and economic diversity, the film is in fact a call for unification in or...

The rebel leader Jose Real is allowed to leave prison for one day to visit his family. But it is a ruse to make him reveal the whereabouts of his rebel gang. This existential drama disguised as a saga about the proletarian struggle presents a lonely ...

The picture compares the fate of two heroines Anna and her lively and energetic sister-in-law Vasilisa, who openly defies the old way of life....

Director Frederick Ermler’s last silent feature and the last of four collaborations with actor Fiodor Nikitin. Nikitin plays an officer who spends a decade after the Great War as a shell-shocked amnesiac, until a glimpse of a woman through a train wi...

A young country girl who becomes an apple seller is seduced and abandoned. She finds a protector but when he is arrested for theft she finds honest work in a factory....

An adaptation of Evgenii Zamiatin’s short story “The Cave,” about a musician dying of hunger in his large, unheated Petersburg apartment because he was not needed in the revolutionary city....

The film tells about the Decembrists’ revolt in the south of Russia. Right before the Decembrist Revolt 1825 a chevalier of fortune decides that it's time for a game. But on whom to make a bet? He asks the cards. But he's not the only one who makes ...

Shame or Counterplan is a 1932 Soviet drama film directed by Sergei Yutkevich and Fridrikh Ermler. The film’s title-song called "The Song of the Counterplan", composed by Dmitri Shostakovich, became world famous and was adapted into "Au-devant de la...

A compilation of newsreels shot between 1913 and 1917 - the years leading up to the Russian Revolution....

A little girl denounce her evil step-father who plotted against the communist movement. The film, under the influence of Russian formalism, has some interesting experimental compositions....

About the fate of a ex-Wrangel's White Army soldier who flees from the Foreign Legion and returns to the USSR....

Pavel Petrov-Bytov was an enfant terrible of the highbrow Leningrad Sovkino film factory. He was notorious for his article “We Have No Soviet Filmmaking,” in which he criticized all the achievements of the Soviet avant-garde. In spite of his beliefs ...

Chinese workers start a rebellion, arm themselves and take over the train on which they are travelling and manage to break through the frontier....

When Praskovya’s new husband attempts to hurt her on their wedding night, she fights back, and when he’s called away to fight in World War I not long after, she tends to their farm on her own, determined to make the best of a bad situation....

Depicts life in the Solovki prison camp as a vacation at a holiday resort, pointing at the authorities’ efforts to humanise the re-education of criminals via an aesthetics of normalcy....

This SovKino production was a major early experiment in Soviet historical film about the oprichnina period of Muscovite history, combining the costumed drama and Gothic thrills of the genre with historical materialist commentary on the dialectical co...