Aleksandr

A heroic fantasy about an artist’s destiny at the tumultuous time of social transformations. One of director Alexander Mitta’s best films. The south of Russia, 1920. In a town square, a mono-performance is on, based on Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”. The film’s hero who took the pseudonym “Revarm”, which stands for “Revolutionary Art for the Masses”, is seriously interested in theatre. The real life and the stage one are intertwined in his destiny. In a provincial town where the power continuously changes hands, going from the Reds to the Whites, from the Whites to a band of the Greens, this youthful stage reformer, endowed with the gift of persuasion, attracts people to his cause, leaving no one indifferent.

The Commissar of the title, played by Nonna Mordyukova, is a Soviet functionary wielding power over a remote Jewish village. Neither she nor the villagers care for the status quo, but over a period of several weeks both come to accept the situation and to establish a detente. The film's pro-Semitism was not entirely in keeping with Soviet policy of the 1960s, thus the film was shelved and hidden from the general public. Only with the thawing of East-West relationships, and the political upheaval in Russia itself, was The Commissar deemed "safe" for general consumption. The film was finally distributed in 1988, twenty years after its completion.

When in 1941 Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, their troops quickly besieged Leningrad. Foreign journalists are evacuated but one of them

A despairing scholar sells his soul to Satan in exchange for one night with a beautiful young woman.