Dir: Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying, True Friends) Winner: Archival Award, National Society of Film Critics Awards, USA, 1996

Initially commissioned as propaganda, its technical tour-de-force and celebration of communist kitsch has made it a cult film, earning admiration from film-makers Francis Ford Coppola to Martin Scorsese. In four stories of the revolution, Mikhail Kalatov’s astonishingly acrobatic camera takes the viewer on a rapturous roller-coaster ride of bathing beauties, landless peasants, fascist police, and student revolutionaries.