Sovtastic Scientifiction-films from the East

[JOE SOAP]

How the other side are





Beautiful lookin' Hungarian Sci-Fi film by a film-maker with a fabulous name: Zoltan Sostai




CYCLE






The Astronaut arrives on a strange rooftop, disorientated he looks for answers, encountering a strange masked man who seems to know more than he is saying. Behind them both approaches a deadly black fog that slowly covers everything.

The Astronaut runs, finds a doorway and suddenly is back on the roof, repeating his actions?! He seems to have only a short memory but he needs to find a way home.

He starts to stay for longer in different strange scenes where he meets the same people again and again, but each time they act differently and the stories they tell change.

The film focuses on a universal problem solving situation rather than on classic linear storytelling.

Like TRON meets ENTER THE VOID, this film is a visual assault and a fresh narrative rhythm - you will be amazed and perplexed until the very end.


http://www.cycle-themovie.com/trailer.html


World premiere at SCI-FI-LONDON:


http://www.sci-fi-london.com/news/cinema/2012/03/five-world-premieres-sci-fi-london-2012









History of the Arkanar Massacre or Hard to be a God

Believe it or not this is a modern Russian film that's been in production for the past 12 years directed by Aleksei German, it'll be debuting in Cannes. It looks genuinely like a Tarkovsky film from the 60's. It's an adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers novel Hard to be a God, the film is called History of the Arkanar Massacre. Who knows what the fuck it'll be like though.

"On another planet, which goes through its middle ages, a group of historians from Earth live pretending to be average people. The main character, known as Don Rumata, is disgusted by cruelties he observes on everyday basis but is prohibited by his superiors from interfering and thus changing the natural course of history of the planet. The only thing the historians have a right to do is to protect and help few individuals who seem to be different from everybody else and can benefit the entire planet through their knowledge and ideas. Rumata has to find one of these people, Budakh, and rescue him from the hands of Don Reba, a ruler of the country and an insane tyrant."







http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KtqwQLGkao








Dau



Another insanely ambitious Russian production:


Five years ago, a relatively unknown director -Ilya Khrzhanovsky- began one of the wildest experiments in film history. Armed with total creative control, he invaded a Ukrainian city, marshaled a cast of thousands and thousands, and constructed a totalitarian society in which the cameras are always rolling and the actors never go home.





A movie based on the life of Soviet quantum physicist Lev Landau 1908 – 1968. To film it, Khrzahnovsky has done the unthinkable: he's set up an exact replicable of a Soviet town inside an enormous brick building, where saying the wrong word can either mean loss of paycheck, or, loss of job.










http://www.gq.com/entertainment/movies-and-tv/201111/movie-set-that-ate-itself-dau-ilya-khrzhanovsky

[WhitBloke]

Dau's production looks like Synecdoche, New York only gone (even more) mad.  Cheers, Mr Soap.  That and History of the Arkanar Massacre (complete with bearded barbarian blues flautist!) just went on my Must-Bother-To-Watch list. 

[M.I.K.]

http://www.cycle-themovie.com/trailer.html

1.46 is very Portal.

[SpetsnaZ99]

From the 'Cycle' trailer :-

"IT is everywhere"
"And IT is collapsing"
"You will see IT"
"but you will not find IT"
"no-one can open IT"
"or even look inside IT"
"but fear not"
"because IT is the first"
"and IT is the last"

Yep, sounds like the IT department where I work

[Adrian Bamforth]

Oddly enough I was just talking to someone today about one of my faourite films, Seksmisja, a Polish saucy sci-fi comedy with political overtones. It's difficult to recommend it to people on account of it's English title being 'Sex Mission', which evokes Robin Askwith, though it does share some plot elements with The Two Ronnies' 'The Worm That Turned'.

It actually looks surprisingly epic for a 1980s sci fi film, and the comedy is excellent. I recommend finding the subtitled DVD for this one.

'The two protagonists, Max and Albert, played by Jerzy Stuhr and Olgierd Łukaszewicz, respectively, submit themselves in 1991 to the first human hibernation experiment. Instead of being awakened a few years later as planned, they wake up in the year 2044, in a post-nuclear world. By then, humans have retreated to underground living facilities, and, as a result of subjection to a specific kind of radiation, all males have died out. Women reproduce through parthenogenesis, living in an oppressive feminist society, where the apparatchiks teach that women suffered under males until males were removed from the world.'

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MtF0heICak&feature=youtube_gdata_player (Trailer in Polish)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mbGc4JSCHS4&feature=youtube_gdata_player (Scene with subtitles)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexmission

[Emperor]

I would love to see more of these but availability can be tricky.

There was a good article in the Guardian by Alex Cox (obviously) that realy got me wondering what else was out there:
www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/jun/30/russian-science-fiction-sci-fi-films-bfi

There is also a solid list on IMDB:
www.imdb.com/list/8jUoR9O5bNs/


Some of the films are public domain an easily available (I suspect there are more of these films that are free to download but aren't so easy to find):

Aelita (1924)
www.archive.org/details/Aelita-QueenOfMarsrussianScience-fictionFilm1924

Aerograd (1935)
www.archive.org/details/aerograd

Nebo zovyot / Battle Beyond the Sun (1962)
www.archive.org/details/BattleBeyondTheSun

Moskva-Kassiopeya / From Moscow to Cassiopeia (1973)
www.archive.org/details/FromMoscowToCassiopeiamoskva-kassiopeyacl

Teens in the Universe (1975) - the sequel:
www.archive.org/details/TeenagersInTheUniverseotrokiVoVselennoj