Dmitri Shostakovich

Blending lively music and brilliant animation, this sequel to the original 'Fantasia' restores 'The Sorcerer's Apprentice' and adds seven new shorts.

A Finnish man goes to the city to find a job after the mine where he worked is closed and his father commits suicide.

A biopic based on the life of Russian literary critic Vissarion Belinsky (1811–1848). The production of the film was completed in 1951, but it was not released until 1953, following the reshooting of various scenes demanded by Stalin.

A dramatization of the 1919 defense of Petrograd, focusing on Bolshevik leadership and the defeat of White Army forces during the Russian Civil War.

A young teacher is sent to a remote province, separating her from her lover, and sets about the difficult task of building a school there.

The story of the Bolshevik revolution through the eyes of a peasant who, as a soldier, gets caught up in the proceedings under the tutelage of Lenin.

Soviet and American soldiers are meeting on the shores of the Elbe river in Germany in 1945.

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

A rare astronomical phenomenon — the parade of planets — has a strange effect on several men. The heroes of the film — an astrophysicist, locksmith, salesman, architect, loader, trolley bus driver — are called up for military training, which ends ahead of time. There is a strange pause in their life — no one knows where they are, no one is waiting for them, and they themselves can not rush anywhere. This short respite in a hasty and busy life gives the heroes the opportunity to experience strong and very important feelings for them.

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.

A political drama set in the fictional country of Illyria between 1943 and 1945, the story is about the assassination of a leading politician. The country, an ally of Nazi Germany, is on the verge of being annexed to the Eastern Bloc. Kaurismäki's TV adaptation of Jean-Paul Sartre's play Les Mains Sales (Dirty Hands) tells the story of Hugo (Matti Pellonpää) who has just been released from prison. Before going to prison, he has worked as a journalist at his party's newspaper. This timid journalist, who uses the pseudonym Raskolnikov, wants to advance in his career and gets his chance when Hoederer (Sulevi Peltola), the leader of the party, has to be eliminated.

At a decrepit farm outside a remote American desert community, something takes over the minds of some of the local humans and animals and is able to see through their eyes and control their actions.

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.

King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.

Surrounded by a few party officials, Alexei Ivanov, a stakhanovist smelter, is decorated by Stalin. The "Little Father of the Peoples" takes this opportunity to invoke threats of war.... One day, war indeed breaks out. Bombs fall on the field where Alexei finds himself in the company of the schoolmistress Natacha, his fiancée. Alexei joins the Red Army and soon becomes a sergeant. Fighting rages and German troops advance. Natacha is arrested and deported. But the tide turns decisively with the German defeat at Stalingrad. Now the major offensive against Hitler can begin.

In one of the steppe regions of Kazakhstan arrives on Komsomol youth squad. Severe frosts, spring mud flows, exhausting work than their specialty - the development of virgin land does not come easy. But the young are young - they work, enjoy life, fall in love. In the center of the story - the touching romance secretary of the Komsomol organization and tractor driver Anne.

The supremely world-weary Lemmy Caution, last seen in Godard's "Alphaville" (France/1965), has several strange encounters while trying to make his way from the former East Germany to "the west."

The final part of trilogy about the life of a young factory worker, Maxim. Following the Russian Revolution, Maksim is appointed state commissar in charge of the national bank. With great efforts, he learns the complexies of the banking trade and begins to fight off sabotaging underlings. Dymba, now a violent enemy of the Republic, tries to rob a wine store but is arrested with Maksim's help. Maksim also exposes a conspiracy of a group of tsarist officers who prepare an attempt against Lenin. He then joins the Red Army in its fight against the German occupation.

Fifty years after the death of Dmitri Shostakovich, the Gewandhaus in Leipzig is paying tribute to one of the most played composers of the 20th century with a festival entirely dedicated to him. The programme for the opening concert in the futuristic setting of the Great Hall includes the Piano Concerto No. 2 in F major, with Daniil Trifonov as soloist, and the Symphony No. 4 in C minor.

In 1942, local teenagers are organizing the underground resistance in the city of Krasnodon during the Nazi occupation of Russia. The teens manage to outsmart the Nazis in their fight, and their activity lifts the spirits of the surviving citizens.