"Trotsky and Mexico, two revolutions of the twentieth century" tells us of the famous Russian revolutionary asylum by President Lazaro Cardenas in Mexico.

The Katyn massacre, carried out by the Soviet NKVD in 1940, was only one of many unspeakable crimes committed by Stalin's ruthless executioners over three decades. The mass murder of thousands of Polish officers was part of a relentless purge, the secrets and details of which have only recently been partially revealed.

Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.

In 2018, IDFA screened Dziga Vertov’s long-lost documentary Anniversary of the Revolution (1918). But there was yet another lost masterpiece by this pioneer of Soviet cinema. In 1921, Vertov edited The History of the Civil War, in which he told the story of the years when the Bolsheviks struggled to defeat domestic opposition to the revolution. It must have been a great adventure for Vertov. He filmed street fights, attended military tribunals, and lay in trenches. Wherever he went he found devastation, damaged infrastructure, and bodies being collected on the streets. This is an unvarnished record of a country in chaos, marked by unstable alliances and brutal violence. So it’s understandable that the film’s producers decided not to release it at all. The History of the Civil War has only been screened once before, in 1921. Nikolai Izvolov used historical records to reconstruct the original silent film from archive material and commissioned a new soundtrack.

Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.

While lacking the grandeur and narrative technique of Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, this French film from Pathe makes a decent job of recreating key moments from the Russian revolution of 1905 in Odessa. A dramatization of the uprising in Odessa, Russia in 1905: A ship's crew, tired of being mistreated, mutinies and takes over their ship. When they reach land, a sailor who died during the mutiny is made a martyr, inspiring an uprising in the city. Then the authorities decide to repress the revolt with a brutal show of force.