Aleksey German
A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization, which is in the Medieval phase of its own history, to find the right path to progress. Their task is a difficult one: they cannot interfere violently and in no case can they kill. The scientist Rumata tries to save the local intellectuals from their punishment and cannot avoid taking a position. As if the question were: what would you do in God's place?
Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".
A detective-dramatic chronicle of love adventures of the famous Russian ballerina Olga Spesivtseva, nicknamed by contemporaries Red Giselle. It was Giselle who immortalized her name in 1924. It was "Giselle" that caused the psychic catastrophe in 1942.
Closely based on Franz Kafka's book "Das Schloß", the movie shares the same action on a land surveyor who is called to a village to do a job that no one seems to have ordered. Once there, he takes up the struggle against bureaucracy emanating from the castle.
Aleksei German produced and co-wrote (with wife and regular collaborator Svetlana Karmalita) Ardak Amirkulov’s staggering historical epic about the intrigue and turmoil preceding Genghis Khan’s systematic destruction of the lost East Asian civilization of Otrar. The movie that spurred the extraordinary wave of great Kazakh films in the 90s, The Fall of Otrar is at once hallucinatory, visually resplendent and ferociously energetic, packed with eye-catching (and gouging) detail and traversing an endless variety of parched, epic landscapes and ornate palaces.
Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.
A story of a three friends childhood in the sieged during WWII Leningrad.
War correspondent Lopatin takes a 20-day-leave from his hard work at the front in 1942. He travels to faraway Tashkent to meet the family of the killed soldier and visit the film set of the screen adaptation of his war-time stories. Lopatin also manages to walk the streets of Tashkent, take part in a factory workers' meeting and have a short-lived love affair. Although with no bombings and fighting, the city dwellers breathe the atmosphere of the ongoing war.
A Russian POW joins the partisan guerrillas and proves his loyalty fighting the Nazis. Filmed in 1971, but "shelved" until 1986.
German apparently disavowed this, his first film, because of his co-director Grigori Aranov's more classical approach (and his kowtowing to Soviet authority); too bad, because it's something of a knockout. A brilliant, gripping portrait of the era of "Red Terror" during the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, The Seventh Companion offers a superlative character study in General Adamov (Andrei Popov), a law professor in the tsarist army, who is incarcerated by the Bolshevik secret police along with many other members of the bourgeoisie. Finally released into the new world of the Soviet Union, the resigned officer finds that he has lost everything from his old life except a mantel clock that he carries through the night from place to place, until he ends up, like Rossellini's inmate seeking readmission to prison in Dovè la liberta?, back where he started.
Veteran film historian and critic Ron Holloway interviews the Russian director.
