…And Still I Believe
Originally called World '68, later retitled The World of Today Romm’s film was conceived as an impassioned, large-scale essay on the origins of the 20th century and the subsequent reality the disappointed director felt slipping away from him. The film itself slipped away from him and was left unfinished at the time of his death. His younger colleagues, Marlen Khutsiev, Elem Klimov and German Lavrov, completed the film from the elements he left behind in addition to segments from Ordinary Fascism, closing the film with Romm’s ultimately optimistic outlook: "And still I believe that man is sensible..."
Elem Klimov
Marlen Khutsiyev
Mikhail Romm
Mikhail Romm
Solomon Zenin
Aleksandr Novogrudsky
Also Directed by Elem Klimov
A half-fiction half-documentary story about sport and it's importance in everyday life.
A young schoolboy tries to help the girl he likes to pass a test.
Details the life of the Russian monk Rasputin. The film shows his rise to power and how it corrupted him. His sexual perversions and madness ultimatly leads to his gruesome assasination.
Matyora is a small village on a beautiful island with the same name. The existence of the village is threatened with flooding by the construction of a dam. This is the story of the inhabitants of Matyora and their farewell to their homeland.
A satirical comedy about the excessive restrictions that children face during their vacation in a Young Pioneer camp.
The invasion of a village in Byelorussia by German forces sends young Florya into the forest to join the weary Resistance fighters, against his family's wishes. There he meets a girl, Glasha, who accompanies him back to his village. On returning home, Florya finds his family and fellow peasants massacred. His continued survival amidst the brutal debris of war becomes increasingly nightmarish, a battle between despair and hope.
Elem Klimov's diploma film at VGIK.
Elem Klimov's documentary ode to his wife, director Larisa Shepitko, who was killed in an auto wreck.
This is story about a dentist with the talent of painlessly extracting teeth, and what happens to him as a result of being naturally good at his job.
Also Directed by Marlen Khutsiyev
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Three lifelong friends who return to Moscow after their military service and whose fathers have been killed in the war see their aspirations juxtaposed against everyday life in 1960s Soviet Union. They reflect on their possible futures and their place in society.
A woman is forced to examine the emptiness of her life in this stark drama from the Soviet Union. Lena (Yevgenya Uralova) is a woman in her late twenties who loves her boyfriend (Aleksandr Belyavsky) but in time comes to see that their relationship serves no useful function. What's more, she sees that her friends are for the most part empty-headed lackeys, causing her to wonder just what is the point of her life.
A young man is forced to spend a few days with his father in law...
At the end of the Second World War, Fedor is demobilized and returns home where he meets a homeless boy, small Fedor. They decide to live together. The adult works in the building trade and the boy goes to school and looks after the house. They get on very well until Natacha arrives in big Fedor's life. After marrying big Fedor, Natacha tries to win the child's love. But he remains hostile.
Having returned from the army, 20-year-old Sergei settles down at the thermal power station and merges into ordinary life. Every day he meets and spends time with childhood friends — the young family man Slava and the merry fellow Nikolai, and once at first sight he falls in love with a stranger on the bus. A lyrical story about a generation of young people entering adulthood, a reappraisal of values, life principles, traditions in culture and art.
Virtually unseen since its Soviet television broadcast in 1971, the film, Peter Rollberg writes, is “devoted to the anniversary of the Paris commune, mixing historical footage with images of present-day Paris.”
Fifty-year-old Vladimir Ivanovich Prokhorov, relieved of his worldly possessions, takes a journey back in time. Accompanied by a traveling companion barely half his age, he revisits the people and places of his youth and witnesses the dark forces that shaped the 20th century.
An idealistic, sophisticated young woman meets a rough-around-the-edges, blue collar man and rejects him, only to find out later that they are destined for true love together, despite the fact that he cannot now pass his certification test after she threw him out of her adult education class.
A few days after the unconditional surrender of German troops, a group of Soviet soldiers is billeted at a farmyard which the war somehow never seems to have reached. This apparently peaceful picture is eerily undermined when the Red Army soldiers are confronted with the full extent of Nazi terror.
Also Directed by Mikhail Romm
Romm's "Ordinary Fascism" pulls out all the stops in its selection of documentary material to draw the viewer not only into absolute horror about fascism and nazism in the 1920s-1940s Europe, but also to a firmest of convictions that nothing of the sort should be allowed to happen again anywhere in the world.
A story about tragic events in France during the German occupation in WWII.
Lenin Is Alive!
The film is based on the play by K. Simonov. It is the story of an American journalist who spends time in Russia and sees socialism in action. Upon his return to the U.S., a prestigious editor asks him to write a book about his experience. He receives a handsome advance for the project and he and his fiancée are able to buy a house, a car, and other symbols of the American dream. But the editor’s generosity comes with a caveat: the book must present a negative picture of Soviet society. Will he simply keep the money and do what is expected of him, or will he instead tell the truth?
The spiritual and material misery of a group of people inhabiting the hotel of the title during the War.
A Russian peasant woman is captured by Nazis and sold into slavery in Germany. Shown in Cannes in 1946.
Commissioned by Josef Stalin to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Soviet Revolution, Lenin in October was the first of Russian director Mikhail Romm's tributes to the Marxist visionary who helped orchestrate the insurrection of October, 1917.
The Soviet intelligence officer Martha Shirke honorably fulfills the command mission, but the Nazis expose her ...
Historical epic about the legendary Russian naval commander of the 18th century, admiral Fyodor Ushakov, and his fight for Crimea during the Russo-Turkish War.