Dziga Vertov - Shagay, sovet! aka Forward, Soviet! (1926)

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Commissioned by the Moscow Soviet as a documentary and information film for the citizens of Moscow prior to municipal elections, film is a tableau of Soviet life and achievements in the period of reconstruction following the Civil War of 1917-1921.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Mariya aka Maria (1988)

Aleksandr Sokurov creates a visually poetic, elegant, and unforgettable synthesis of art and life in Mariya. The lush and textural initial sequence, shot using color film, presents the austere life of the titular Mariya - a robust, genial, and hard-working middle-aged collective farmer with an engaging smile - during an arduous flax harvest season in the summer of 1975: operating heavy machinery, sharing a meal at a communal table with fellow workers, visiting her young son's grave, enjoying a lazy afternoon by the lake with her family on her day off, and proudly (and uninhibitedly) describing her responsibilities and work ethic before the camera.

Yevgeni Bauer - Umirayushchii Lebed aka The Dying Swan (1917)

Mike Pinsky, DVDVerdict wrote:
Russian film poet Evgeni Bauer combined the technical virtuosity of D.W. Griffith with the haunting terror of Edgar Allan Poe and the artist’s eye of Johannes Vermeer. He is — perhaps — the greatest film director you have never heard of. During his brief four-year career, Evgeni Bauer created macabre masterpieces. They are dramas darkly obsessed with doomed love and death, astonishing for their graceful camera movements, risqué themes, opulent sets and chiaroscuro lighting. Tragically, Bauer died in 1917, succumbing to pneumonia after breaking his leg.

For many decades, Bauer’s films were buried in the Soviet archives — declared too "cosmopolitan" and bizarre for the puritanical Soviet regime. But with the fall of the Iron Curtain, Bauer’s work has risen like a glorious phoenix out of the ashes of time. by MilestoneFilms

Boris Barnet & S. Mardanin - U samogo sinego morya AKA By the Bluest of Seas (1936)

Synopsis:
The sea is at first quite dark for the sailors Aliosha and Yussuf. Adrift, they reach an island where they meet Mashenka, a beautiful girl they both immediately fall in love with...

seagullfilms.com

One of the films revered by French filmmakers such as Godard and Otar Iosseliani, this marvelous picture, a spontaneous and joyful romantic comedy shot at eye-popping locations, stars the delicious Elena Kouzmina as a bouncy island beauty wooed by two young shipwrecked Caspian fisherman. And it's more fun than Alexander Nevsky.

Sergei Loznitsa - Poselenie AKA The Settlement (2001)

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This visually arresting documentary about a strange community in the Russian countryside, shows residents of a rural settlement seemingly involved in everyday farm work -- harvesting fields, chopping wood, working at a sawmill and maintaining the property. Yet, as the film evolves, the viewer comes to realize that the workers, are in fact, patients. Their daily chores serve only therapeutic purposes. Suffused with the sounds and rhythms of rural life, is the film a parable of post-Soviet society or simply a testament to the importance of nature in modern lives?

Sergei Loznitsa - Predstavleniye AKA Revue (2008)

Sergei Loznitsa has once again scoured the Russian film archives for REVUE, selecting excerpts from newsreels, propaganda films, TV shows and feature films that present an evocative portrait of Soviet life during the 1950s and 1960s. With scenes taken from the length and breadth of the Soviet Motherland, REVUE illustrates industry and agriculture (dam construction, steel plants, Stakhanovite labor competitions, farmland seeded by hand and plowed with horse), political life (local elections, abundant Lenin iconography, speeches by Khrushchev, the threat of capitalist spies), popular culture (a village choir, a dance troupe, a travelling cinema, poetry readings for workers, a propagandistic stage play), and technology (space exploration, astronaut Yuri Gargarin, new industrial development). The film's fascinating flow of disparate scenes representing typical Soviet life of the period is, seen from today's perspective, alternately poignant, funny, and tragic. The cumulative impact reveals a life of hardship, deprivation and seemingly absurd social rituals, but one always inspired by the vision, or illusion, of a communist future. Seen from these dual historical and contemporary perspectives, REVUE is both a nostalgic and instructive look back at a communist past that represents social engineering on a grand, and frightening, scale. (icarus-films)

Sergei Loznitsa - Polustanok aka Train Stop (2000)

Trains travel through the night without stopping. The clatter of the carriages quickly disappears, along with the wail of the locomotive. The people at the station are all asleep. But why are they so exhausted ? And what are they waiting for?

Sergei Loznitsa - Zhizn, osin AKA Life, Autumn (1999)

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What first appear to be photographs of elderly Russian peasants and farmers, becomes an evocative meditation on old Russia and new, a snapshot of a disappearing way of life. As they stand in their work clothes, often with tools by their side, looking into the camera, this remarkable film with poetic rigor, captures a people, a world, that is quickly vanishing.

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So wird aus alltäglichem eine ergreifende Wirkung erzielt, teilt sich der Lebensrhythmus, die Geschichte eines Volkes mit Wärme. Lakonie und Humor mit 'Leben, Herbst' schafft es in einer Kürze alle großen Fragen des menschlichen Lebens zu thematisieren und findet damit, Kulturen übergreifend, einen gemeinsamen Nenner. [MDR Kultur]