Based on a short story by Anton Chekhov, Kama Ginkas’ astounding re-imagining highlights and builds off of the Chekhovian tension between the beauty of life and the tragedy of how it is lived. The story tells the the tragic tale of philosophy student Andrey Vasil'ich Kovrin (stage and screen star Sergey Makovetskiy).. On the verge of a nervous breakdown, Kovrin decides to visit his childhood friend Tanya Pesotsky at the estate of her father. As...

Irish playwrights faced a conundrum in the 19th century: they could write in Irish and remain relatively obscure, or they could find success by adopting English, the language of the conqueror. Examine how George Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde navigated their Irish identity on the London stage. Professor Conner provides political and artistic context to their major works.

The Irish Renaissance had largely succeeded in bringing folk life to the center of cultural consciousness by the 1930s. At that time, the poet Patrick Kavanagh—hailing from the rural farmland—emerged with a critique of the sentimentality and nostalgia of Yeats’s generation. Explore how the next wave of poets carved out their own views of Ireland.

Esfir Shub culls her landmark documentary from pre-Soviet Russian newsreels gathered from Europe and America. In May 1913 the Romanov Dynasty celebrates its 300th anniversary at the Russian throne. The last emperor in the long line is czar Nicholas II. He rules over a country with huge social and economic differences. Russia is for the most part still an agrarian society, but capitalism and its industries are growing. In 1914 Russia gets involved...

"A real gem, fusing interviews, analysis and some terrific animation into an intriguing whole that plays like an intelligent thriller. " - Variety..Nominated for the Best Documentary Award at the 2012 Goyas, this is the unbelievable story of Manuel Cortes, the ‘mole of Mijas’. When the Spanish civil war ended and the borders closed, hundreds of people were forced to go into hiding to escape Franco’s repression. They lived for decades, hidden...

Iceland crowd-sourced its constitution online in a rare eruption of optimism among the 2008 financial crisis. Blueberry Soup is a feature length documentary at the epicenter of one of our time’s exciting movements: the Icelandic "People's Movement".. Jaws dropped around the world in October, 2008 as a small collective of bankers brought the global economy to its knees and a small nation’s everyday citizens rose in response by rewriting its constitution....

"By the Law" is a melodrama that takes place in a remote area in the Yukon during the gold rush at the turn of the century. A group of five gold prospectors -- Michael an Irishman; Hans Nelson, the Swede leader of the expedition; his English wife Edith; a Dutchman named Dutchy; and Harky. They have been unsuccessful, and, deciding to move to another location, they order Michael, who does most of the manual work in the camp, to dismantle their prospect...

A 1930 Georgian silent documentary film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. As one of the earliest ethnographic films, it documents the life of the Svan people in the isolated mountain village of Ushguli in Svanetia, in the northwestern part of the Georgian Soviet Republic. Containing some propaganda, the climax of the film shows how a Soviet built road connects the previously isolated mountain village to Soviet civilisation. Many of the scenes of the...

Passengers on a trans-Atlantic flight from London to New York discover that one of them (Attenborough) is mentally unbalanced. Believing a fellow passenger is the hit-and-run driver who killed his child, Attenborough has smuggled a bomb on board and intends to use it..

THE HOUSE ON TRUBNAYA was Boris Barnet's fourth production and a great hit with audiences. With its vibrant humor and a clever commentary on the historical moment, this film was unusual for the 1920s Soviet cinema. Barnet's heart lay in stories about regular people coming to terms with historical changes. In this niche, he excelled as a storyteller, producing moving visual narratives that invite the spectators to enjoy the picturesque, touching strangeness...