Movies: Aleksandr Medvedkin

A hapless loser (with the surname of Loser) undergoes misadventures with avaracious clergy, a tired horse, and a walking granary (among other things) on his road to collectivized happiness....

A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century....

A comedy about a naive young architect and his wild designs for a “New Moscow.” The Soviet censors weren't at all amused and shelved it....

The first of what became a popular genre of wartime 'film-concerts', consisting of eight musical numbers, strung together by a loose plot. It shows soldiers leaving their village for the front; in their absence, the desolate but resolute young women ...

After the liberation of the Kuban by the Soviet Army troops, farmers return home and begin to restore the destroyed economy. Under the leadership of the young chairman, Nadiezdha Pritulyak, growers are working with great enthusiasm....

A documentary about the Armenian avant-garde filmmaker, Artavazd Pelešjan....

A comedy about Krushchev's 'Virgin Lands' project, to transform the barren and inhospitable spaces of the vast Soviet Union into fertile agricultural plains. A classically Socialist-Realist narrative of an individual's 're-education'. Zhenia, a hapl...

This half-hour documentary focuses on Medvedkin and his CineTrain of the 1930s, a sort of mobile film workshop, complete with post-production facilities, animation stations and a large laboratory. Traveling thousands of miles across the Russian count...

The director's reflections on the modern politics of the Reagan administration....

Life in a Russian village at harvest time as idealized peasant pastoral, concentrating on the landscapes and folk songs of the region....

Film by Aleksandr Medvekin to a metonymic Chinese friend, advocating against Mao and the Ussuri River Skirmish....

About the difficult political situation in the world related to the arms race....

A lazy farmer Tit takes the only job he can do: being a scarecrow in a field. Original movie is lost but in 2000 it was reconstructed by Nikolay Izvolov based on Medvedkin's script and drawings....

Lazy or incompetent peasants try to malinger and wriggle their way out of duties at the Kolkhoz....

The only surviving film from the first trip of Aleksandr Medvedkin's Kinopoezd (film train). A 'film-newspaper' demonstrating one key aspect of the train's work: the desire to encourage shame. In it, poor workers are named and shamed outright and l...

Satire directed at the American humanitarian initiative launched in Europe in 1948 and mostly known as the Marshall Plan. Soviet Union famously rejected the offer despite suffering from 1946-1947 major famine....

The eleven films that survived from the series of films shot, edited, and shown from three custom railway cars travelling throughout the Soviet Union from 1932 to 1935. A project by Alexandr Medvedkin, though he isn't mentioned in the titles. The ca...

An extraordinary document from one of the Cold War's bitterest conflicts - between the Soviet Union and Communist China - this film spares no quarter in its indictment of Maoist evils and misrule....

This documentary is about the struggle against colonialism in Africa....

About the huge international assistance that the USSR provided to China....