No one knows why for certain, but from 1968 to 1973 communist Albania enjoyed a brief liberalisation in the arts. Banned books and Beatles records changed hands. Albania’s Nobel-nominated novelist Ismail Kadare wrote two of his most famed masterpieces, Kështjella (The Castle) (1970) and Kronikë në gur (Chronicle in Stone) (1971) during this period. The rock'n'roll and jazz arrangements featured in this concert documentary were the pretext that brought about the end to the artistic thaw. Several performers seen in the festival were sent to prison or internal exile. The portly, smiling music conductor, Gasper Çurçia, was later accused of forging bus tickets and executed.
The story of Viktor Stratoberdha (1921-1991) mirrors many of Albania’s tragedies. Stradoberdha’s humorous, buoyant style led him to be one of the country’s most promising filmmakers. But after being denounced in 1956, he was expelled from the Kinostudio and sent into internal exile. In 1967, Stratoberdha directed a local theater play in which the economic five year plan was placed in a coffin. He was then jailed for the next two decades. Urime Shokë Studentë! is one of the surviving documentaries of Viktor Stratoberdha’s all too short career.
A film about the experiences that Czechoslovak peasants gained on a study trip to the Soviet Union.
The Oil Symphony is a film about the heroic efforts of Azerbaijani labourers drilling for oil.
Girls in my Hometown, released in 1991, is a melodrama dealing with individualism and sacrifice. A young girl has a friend who has just come back from abroad, bringing with her foreign fashions and foreign ideas. When the solider to whom the friend was engaged becomes blinded in an accident, she decides to put herself first, neglecting her duties to her fiancé and the community she lives in.
A comedy about life during the 1970's. A father refuses to accept his son marrying a girl from a different religion, thus leading to several comical situations.
Documentary about the life and career of Karl-Eduard von Schnitzler, presenter and creator of the infamous GDR propaganda programme 'Der Schwarze Kanal' ('The Black Channel').
The documentary Their Kingdom, co-directed in 1928 by Nutsa Gogoberidze and Mikhail Kalatozishvili (Kalatozov) for Soviet Georgia’s Cinema Trust, was considered lost until 2008, when there appeared a possibility that this important film – Georgia’s first documentary feature and Kalatozov’s directorial debut – had not disappeared irretrievably.
A squadron of American warplanes, armed with gas developed by Corsican chemist Gannimer (dubbed "Napoleon Gas") flies to Leningrad. American workers inform soviet comrades about the impending catastrophe. But the air attack on the city has already begun, and the assault troops of the enemy capture one suburb of the city after the other. The Red Army is organizing the defense and reflects the attack of the enemy with gas-armed drones
The first animated movie made in the Soviet Union, it portrays a bloated caricature of a Capitalist devouring a massive heap of food and drink.
Montage of documentary footage from the liberation and building of the republic as a tribute to JV Stalin on his seventieth birthday.
The film is dedicated to the achievements of the Ukrainian SSR for the eleventh anniversary of the October Revolution.
Commissioned by the Moscow Soviet as a documentary and information film for the citizens of Moscow prior to municipal elections, film is a tableau of Soviet life and achievements in the period of reconstruction following the Civil War of 1917-1921.