The Russian Cracker

Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project(en)

Marion Stokes secretly recorded television 24 hours a day for 30 years from 1975 until her death in 2012. For Marion taping was a form of activism to seek the truth, and she believed that a comprehensive archive of the media would be invaluable for future generations. Her visionary and maddening project nearly tore her family apart, but now her 70,000 VHS tapes are being digitized and they'll be searchable online.

Island Ablazed(ru)

Documentary recounting the story of the Cuban Revolution and its impact on the young people of Cuba.

National Geographic: The Volga(en)

Film cameras cruise the Soviet Union's mighty Volga River, providing a view of the Russian people along its 2300-mile length, including looks at the fishing industry, a rural village, a manufacturing town and the wedding of two factory workers.

The John Wayne Gacy Murders: Life and Death in Chicago(en)

Summaries "The John Wayne Gacy Murders: Life and Death in Chicago", Focuses on serial killer John Wayne Gacy's time in Chicago and includes information about Gacy's childhood, his career of crime in Waterloo, Iowa, and Gacy's becoming a celebrity in prison. Containing interviews with Chicago attorneys, news reporters, law enforcement officers, and history experts, the film illustrates what the atmosphere was like in Chicago when Gacy was murdering and ultimately apprehended. Gacy's time in prison as a celebrity serial killer is also explored in this groundbreaking film by Chicago native filmmaker John Borowski. —John Borowski

Bazaar Bizarre: The Strange Case of Serial Killer Bob Berdella(en)

In 1988, Chris Bryson was found running down a Kansas City street naked, beaten, and bloody wearing nothing but a dog collar and a leash. He told police about Bob Berdella, a local business man and how Berdella had caputed him, held him hostage, raped him, tortured him and photographed him over several days. Police later arrested Berdella and searched his home where they found several hundred polaroid photographs, a detailed torture log, envelopes of human teeth and a human skull. It was soon discovered that Berdella had murdered 6 young men in his home after drugging them and performing his sick acts of sexual torture. Some lived the horrors for only a few days, one for 6 weeks. After death Berdella would cut up the bodies with an electric chain saw and a bone knife, place the body parts in empty dog food bags for trash collection on Monday. Although he denied this, it is believed that Berdella used organs of the victims as in food dishes he would serve at his shop.

Who are we? Psychoanalysis of Ukrainians(uk)

Zelenskyy: The Man Who Took on Putin(en)

The rise of the comedian, actor and entertainer who became the improbable wartime leader. Exploring the man behind the series of game changing social media and TV appearances which have encapsulated the defiant response of a nation.

Dragan Wende - West Berlin(de)

Dragan Wende has lived in Berlin since the '70s and has seen the city change through the years. His nephew comes to live with him as Dragan remembers the better days he lived as a Yugoslavian immigrant in a divided city.

Khrushchev Does America(fr)

The story of the unconditional, no-holds-barred tour of America by Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev, leader of World Communism and America's arch nemesis, during 13 sun-filled days in the fall of 1959.

Servant of the people, Zelensky(pl)

Are the absolute power and weakness of the state tempting enough to initiate authoritarian rule? This documentary shows Zelensky's success and also presents the consequences, including international ones, of giving power to a man who had the most spectacular political career in Europe.

In Paradisum(et)

In Paradisum relates two disturbing stories simultaneously. The female narrator tells her personal tale of imprisonment as the wife of the notorious Estonian serial killer, Andreas Hanni. Although her story is bizarre, it touches familiar themes that run throughout modern life: the desire to be loved and the fear of being alone. Pille Hanni's tale unfolds over cinema vérité images of life in several Estonian prisons. At times the images reflect in a literary way the events of the narration, yet they are representations and impressions, rather than traditional documentary style footage of the people involved. This opens the story to a more general interpretation, often with unsettling results. The parallel contents reveal, at two levels of story and social organisation, how the bizarre and inhuman can be tolerable and even addictive in the face of our fears.

The Capitalist Conspiracy(en)

Culled mostly from archival footage, this thought-provoking first volume of the Hidden Agenda series relays the little-known history of an elite group of power brokers who wield considerable influence over world affairs. Tracking the growth of the world's largest banking dynasties through the eyes of a conspiracy theorist, the program maintains that the true motivation behind their activities is to control the world itself.

Little Potato(en)

Wes Hurley's autobiographical tale of growing up gay in Soviet Union Russia, only to escape with his mother, a mail order bride, to Seattle to face a whole new oppression in his new Christian fundamentalist American dad.

Ukrainian Independence(uk)

The film’s events take place on a single day: August 24, 2022, the day Ukraine celebrates the 31st anniversary of the renewal of independent statehood. The film combines places and people that best capture the country’s wartime spirit. The locations are: the relatively safe cities of Kyiv and Lviv; the cities under daily missile fire of Kharkiv and Mykolaiv; a trench at the frontlines near Donetsk; and the beaches of Odesa. The film presents a day in the life of a beach police patrol, a woman anti-tank missile operator, a water delivery driver, a mortar unit soldier, a rapid assault unit soldier, a 14-year-old pub janitor, an artist and a former member of parliament. Together, these people and places create an engaging mosaic of a day in the life of Ukraine.

Lightning Before Thunder(en)

A short documentary about how "Fulton" the Ukrainian Football Club came together.

Psychiatry in Russia(en)

In 1955, Albert Maysles traveled by motorcycle throughout Russia. During this trip, he shot what was to become his first film, 'Psychiatry in Russia', an unprecedented view into Soviet mental healthcare. Originally televised by the David Garroway Show on NBC-TV in 1956.

Torn from the Flag(en)

A sociopolitical historical documentary-thriller about the international decline of communism and the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.

Zeitgeist: Moving Forward(en)

A presentation of a case for a needed transition out of the current socioeconomic monetary paradigm which governs the entire world society. This subject matter will transcend the issues of cultural relativism and traditional ideology and move to relate the core, empirical 'life ground' attributes of human and social survival, extrapolating those immutable natural laws into a new sustainable social paradigm called a 'Resource-Based Economy'.

Russian Close-Up(en)

Albert Maysles' visual diary of the faces and places encountered along a cross country motorscooter ride through the Soviet Union in the late 1950s.

Superpower(en)

Sean Penn and Aaron Kaufman’s documentary, shot just before and after Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24th February 2022, and featuring several interviews with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky.