Movies: Communist propaganda

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 masterpiece...

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 f...

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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 w...

A film about life in the Czech borderlands after the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans....

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Montage of documentary footage from the liberation and building of the republic as a tribute to JV Stalin on his seventieth birthday....

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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')....

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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 Kinostu...

Made by the highly influential Russian cameraman Roman Karmen, this documentary vividly features Albanian life immediately after the communists came to power in 1944. The film is especially memorable since it’s missing much of the heavy socialist rea...