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Kira Muratova's Long Farewells (1971) is showing November 5 - December 4, 2020 on Mubi in the United States and Canada.Above: Long FarewellsThe opening scene of Kira Muratova’s first film Brief Encounters (1967) shows Valentina, a local council member in Odessa, writing a speech about agriculture. She reads aloud from her draft, “Comrades,” she begins, “dear Comrades…” Valentina is a model Soviet woman. She rises from the table, enters another room and gets her comrade Stepanovich on the phone. She explains to him that she cannot lead the conference, “Why should I? It’s not my area of expertise.” Stepanovich replies, “Sergey is on vacation, Marchenko is sick.” Valentina is already busy dealing with the town’s economy and will soon be leading another conference on the regional water supply. She fires back, “Why don't you lead the conference yourself?” Stepanovich reminds her that he will only report to her once she...

With only a fraction of the Us's screens, Russia is the seventh-largest global film market. And Hollywood expansion is forcing local cinema-makers to up their game

It was a film with no lead actor that laid claim to the Russian box office last year. Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky, the immensely popular Soviet-era singer-songwriter, poet, actor and man of protest, was always going to be the only person on stage when his biopic got made. The marketing campaign for Vysotskiy. Spasibo, Chto Zhivoy (Vysotsky, Thank God I'm Alive), which opened on 1 December 2011, kept shrewdly stumm about the identity of the actor behind the CGI and the $30,000 silicone mask used to resurrect a national hero (described to me as "John Lennon crossed with James Dean, but sounding like Dylan").

A mystery wrapped inside a dissident enigma, then, and Russians made it the top-grossing local movie of the year ($28m and counting). But they'd...

In this installment of the Butterfly Effect, climate change is creating incredible economic opportunity in the Arctic, leading to saber rattling from Canada and Russia. Whichever region benefits the most will have enormous geopolitical consequences.

1. The Great Melt.

In August 2007, a robotic Russian sub planted a titanium flag on the seabed at the North Pole, an act dismissed as a PR stunt by diplomats in Ottawa and Washington until Russian bombers promptly resumed Arctic patrols for the first time since the Cold War. A few weeks later, the U.S. National Ice Center reported that the fabled Northwest Passage was open and ice-free for the first time in history, theoretically shrinking the distance (and costs) between Asia and Europe by as much as 25%, presuming Canada was willing to let ships use it. The prospect of a Northwest Passage open to commercial traffic could cause a massive shift in the world’s trading lanes,...