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Mikhail Romm’s dense tale of love – for people and for country – has lost none of its cold war potency in the 60 years since it was first released

As the French New Wave was starting to crest, and with the Cuban missile crisis just under a year away, Soviet film-maker Mikhail Romm directed what might have been the nuclear physicists’ version of Jules et Jim. This was the very intriguing Nine Days in One Year, now restored for its 60th anniversary. It’s a poignant love triangle, a story of broken hearts represented, in a rather David Nicholls-ish device, by the events of nine separate days over one year in the romantic lives of those whose duty was to the Soviet motherland – and to the great cause of the Ussr gaining nuclear power.

Dmitri Gusev, played by Aleksey Batalov, is a dedicated scientist working on thermonuclear physics in Siberia,...

IFC Films has released the brand new trailer for Sputnik. Opening in theaters and VOD August 14, take a look below.

Russia, 1983 – Cold War tensions at their peak. A terrifying scene is discovered at the landing site of spacecraft Orbit-4. The commander is dead, the flight engineer in coma. The third crew member, Valery Basov, has survived, but he has lost his memory from the horrific experience and cannot shed light on the cause of the accident. In a secluded government facility, under the vigilant watch of armed guards, psychologist Tatiana Klimova (Oksana Akinshina) must cure the astronaut’s amnesia and unravel the mystery. In the process, she learns that Orbit-4 may have carried back an alien parasite that threatens to consume them all.

Director Egor Abramenko is an established award-winning director of commercials and music videos from Russia. Upon graduation from The Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in 2009, he worked extensively...

Marlen KhutsievI discovered the name Marlen Khutsiev two summers ago at the Locarno Film Festival, where Russian critic and programmer Boris Nelepo introduced an increasingly awestruck audience to the small but overwhelming filmography of this Russian filmmaker. Thankfully for American audiences, the Museum of Modern Art has picked up and continued this essential retrospective, which starts October 5 in New York, expanding it in the process, and so here I will gather my thoughts upon encountering this truly stunning work for the first time.My experience began incongruously with Khutsiev’s last completed feature, 1992's Infinitas, an unexpected choice considering that the film's 206 minute wanderings of a middle-aged man through his life and memories was even to this uninformed viewer clearly autobiographical. After next viewing Khutsiev's 1965 masterpiece variably known as Fortress Il'ichi, Ilych's Gate and I Am Twenty, it was clear that Infinitas is also a continuation or sequel to that semi-autobiographical film,...

Pyshka, 1934, directed by Mikhail Romm. Romm was an intermittently successful Soviet filmmaker who toed the line, making two biopics of Lenin. The fact that Pyshka was sonorized in 1955, with a voice-over, score and sound effects added, suggests that he was still well-regarded then. Romm had a fantastic eye for composition, light, and character. I don't know too much or have too much to say about him, but I think these images speak for themselves, and it's probable that his own Wwi experience informs the shots of dead soldiers that begin the story, by far the movie's most vivid sequence.

Pyshka is adapted from Guy de Maupassant's story Boule de Suif, which has an interesting cinematic history. One of Maupassant's semi-propagandist works dealing with the Franco-Prussian war, it's been bent to the purposes of a number of different filmmakers, nations, and era.

Basically, the story tells of a party...

Come, meet me between silent cinema and sound, and between the Soviets and the Americans, at Mikhail Romm's The Thirteen (1936), a crypto-remake, set in the Afghani desert of the 30s, of John Ford’s The Lost Patrol. A squad traveling home runs out of water and is holed up on a deserted Afghani camp and kept under siege by a roving band of locals, and Romm surprises by having next to no interest in tension (how little water, how few bullets, how many men left) or individuation of the squad to elicit laughter or sympathy (a Soviet trait?). The poetry is formed in the zeroing in of every poetic-material-compositional detail when it is introduced into the film world: the cascading rivers of sand (Teshigahara stole wholesale for Woman in the Dunes), deep space of the desert siege (one tremendous shot: in foreground a Soviet machinegun nest, in focus deep...

This January, Barbican Film’s regular director retrospective series presents the films of one of Russia’s best known and revered Russian film makers, Andrei Konchalovsky.

Konchalovsky was student to the celebrated Mosfilm veteran Mikhail Romm at Vkig (Moscow State Film School) and his filmmaking career has seen him receive both censorship and major awards such as Venice Grand Special Jury Prize for his 2002 work, House of Fools (2002).

This is going to be a fantastic event with an introduction by Konchalovsky to his self-penned satire Gloss (2007) on the 20th and a ScreenTalk discussing his expose of the Chechen conflict House of Fools (for which he was attacked in Russia by critics for being “warmongering,”) on the 22nd.

The films being screened cover Konchalovsky’s early and more recent works including his first full length debut film First Teacher (1961) on the 29th and what is regarded as one of the greatest Russian language films,...