Directed by Arūnas Žebriūnas • Drama • With Gediminas Girdvainis, Vaiva Mainelytė • 1974 • 76 minutes
In the early 1970s, behind the Iron Curtain, Lithuanian director Arūnas Žebriūnas created one of the wildest rock operas of the decade. A mash-up of TOMMY, JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR, FIDDLER ON THE ROOF and THE WICKER MAN filled with ecstatic hippie orgies in heaven, legions of female demons on horseback, rituals of mistletoe and rowan berries and an impish devil exiled to a small village to cause havoc
Up Next in Russia & the Former Soviet Union
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Dead Mountaineer's Hotel
Directed by Grigori Kromanov • Drama • 1979 • 84 minutes
Estonian director Grigori Kromanov's dazzling, paranoid mixture of locked-room mystery, 1970s Euro giallo, classic noir whodunit, and (unbelievably) alien sci-fi ala THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, based on a novel by famed Soviet authors Arkad...
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State of Weightlessness
Directed by Maciej J. Drygas • Documentary • 1994 • 60 minutes
State of Weightlessness is a documentary that uses long-duration Soviet space missions as a lens through which to examine the psychological and historical dislocation of the late Cold War period. Drawing on rare audio recordings from...
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Sampo
Directed by Aleksandr Ptushko • Drama • With Anna Orochko, Urho Somersalmi, Andris Osins • 1959 • 91 minutes
Based on the Finnish national epic "Kalevala," director Aleksandr Ptushko's ravishing, mystical fantasy tells the story of a sinister witch Louhi (Anna Orochko) who covets the Sampo, a ma...
