Paradise

Rasputin: Murder in the Tsar's Court

December 2016 •German

St. Petersburg, Russia, December 30th, 1916. Grigori Rasputin is assassinated. The story of the humble peasant who became the most influential adviser to czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of the last czar, Nicholas II Romanov.

The White Reindeer

April 2019 •Hungarian

Imagine one of the most remote wildernesses in the world. Granddaughter Masha and Vladimir, the protagonists of this story from Central Siberia try the impossible to keep their nomadic traditions alive.

Siberian Love

November 2017 •Russian

After 20 years of living in Berlin, the director Olga Delane goes back to her roots in a small Siberian village, where she is confronted with traditional views of relationships, life and love. The man is the master in the home; the woman’s task is to beget children and take care of the household (and everything else, too). Siberian Love provides unrivaled insights into the (love) life of a Siberian village and seeks the truth around the universal value of traditional relationships.

Rebuilding Paradise

January 2020 •English

​On November 8, 2018, a spark flew in the Sierra Nevada foothills, igniting the most destructive wildfire in California history and decimating the town of Paradise. Unfolding during the year after the fire, this is the story of the Paradise community as they begin to rebuild their lives.

I Don't Believe in Anarchy

November 2014 •Russian

The film details the early years of the legendary Siberian Punk/Rock group 'Гражданская Оборона' (Grazhdanskaya Oborona), and its frontman, Egor Letov.

Big Bang in Tunguska

June 2008 •German

At 7:14 am on 30 June 1908, the largest explosion recorded in human history to date reverberated throughout our planet. The force of the explosion was two thousand times that of the Hiroshima bomb. A woodland area the size of Luxembourg was eradicated in the Siberian taiga. This incident is recorded in history books as the Tunguska catastrophe. To this day, internationally renowned scientists of various disciplines argue about the causes of this disastrous explosion. The documentary discusses the latest and most controversial insights of these leading scientists. It identifies the reasons why Tunguska has evolved into a phenomenon and points out the curious results produced by this mythical event in culture and economy.

Ashes

January 2024 •Greek

Burning

September 2021 •English

Follows the deadly Australian bushfires of 2019-2020, known as ‘Black Summer’. Burning is an exploration of what happened as told from the perspective of victims of the fires, activists and scientists.

Target... Earth?

July 1980 •English

Really strange documentary of Wheeler Dixon production quality on the Tunguska Event and the possibility of it happening again causing an apocalypse (basically a meteor scare film) sprinkled with UFO conspiracy kooks, and other 'professionals', riddled with stock footage of all kinds, freaky moog music and sound fx, a Dr. Who rip-off end theme, Victor Buono as Homer the Archivist, a philosophical history recorder in a space ship with a HAL 9000 type talking computer named Ino, there's also another space ship with Egyptian looking aliens girls with pasties and see-thru blouses.

Happy People: A Year in the Taiga

September 2010 •English

In the center of the story is the life of the indigenous people of the village Bakhtia at the river Yenisei in the Siberian Taiga. The camera follows the protagonists in the village over a period of a year. The natives, whose daily routines have barely changed over the last centuries, keep living their lives according to their own cultural traditions.

The Strait Guys

June 2022 •English

THE STRAIT GUYS follows Czech-born mining engineer, George, and his fast-talking protégé, Scott, along the proposed route of the InterContinental Railway through Alaska, to the Bering Strait and onward to Russia. The “Strait Guys” endeavor to convince international governments, corporations, and indigenous tribes to green-light their $100 billion railway project, which would provide ground-based infrastructure across the continents, relieve overcrowded Pacific ports, improve global supply chains, and ease tensions between the superpowers. The US and Russia have been successfully collaborating in space for decades. Now the Strait Guys are out to prove it is also possible down here on earth.

Mammoth Hunter

May 2005 •French

Since the ban on elephant hunting, Russia has had a monopoly on the ivory trade. But this ivory comes from mammoths, whose tusks, skeletons and sometimes frozen bodies are regularly found in the frozen ground of Siberia. According to estimates by some scientists, it could contain the remains of several million mammoths! eternal ice. Their goal: to discover the frozen remains of mammoths trapped in the permafrost. Using derisory means, they dig the frozen ground from which they extract bones, teeth, skulls... and above all, precious mammoth tusks. Ivory - the white gold of the tundra - will sell for over $50 a kilo. A total market appears at $2.5 million, with hubs in Moscow and Hong Kong.

Prisoners of Fire

March 2025 •English

June 26,1990, the Dude Fire rages across Zane Gray country in the towering ponderosa forests below the Mogollon Rim in Central Arizona, killing five prison crew members and a female supervisor on her first fire. Follow along with the survivors and firefighters as they share their experience as inmate firefighters and their harrowing story of courage, loss and redemption.

Fireline

December 2023 •English

Enter the spectacle and drama of a Megafire, alongside firefighting teams struggling to save anything they can while protecting each other; revealing the friendship, heartbreak, and exhilaration of going to war against an elemental force.

Journey to the East

May 2021 •English

Could our mounting modern problems have ancient solutions? Travel to the depths of China to find out.

Beyond the White

September 2021 •English

In Northern Russia, a few dozen people still live in their traditional houses surrounded by water, stone, and sand. Cut off from vital infrastructure, almost forgotten by regional governance, these people have to cope with their everyday struggles.

The Bounty Hunter of Mongolia

October 2021 •French

In the Darhat valley in northern Mongolia, the horses of nomadic tribes are stolen by bandits who then sell them to Russian slaughterhouses. Shukhert, a brave horseman, relentlessly pursues them through the Mongolian taiga, bordering Siberia.

Braguino

November 2017 •Russian

In the middle of the Siberian taiga, 450 miles from the nearest village, live two families : the Braguines and the Kilines. Not a single road leads there. A long trip on the Ienissei River, first by boat, then by helicopter, is the only way to reach Braguino. Self-sufficient, both families live there according to their own rules and principles. In the middle of the village: a barrier. The two families refuse to speak. In the river sits an island, where another community is being built : that of the children. Free, unpredictable, wild. Stemming from the fear of the other, that of wild beasts, and the joy procured by the immensity of the forest, unravels a cruel tale in which tensions and fear give shape to the geography of an ancestral conflict.

East of Paradise

December 2005 •English

Filmmaker Lech Kowalski explores his belief that struggle is "the epitome of living" in this documentary which compares the wildly different life experiences of himself and his mother. Kowalski's mother came of age in Poland during the early stages of World War II, and after failed attempts to outrun both Nazi and Russian forces she and her family were sent to a Soviet concentration camp, where inmates were tortured, mistreated, and starved to the point where some ate their own lice in a desperate struggle to survive. Kowalski also depicts his own self-inflicted season in hell during his years on the New York City punk rock scene as he wallowed in the sordid underbelly of drug addiction, pornography, prostitution, and streetwise decadence. On both stories, Kowalski finds a message of hope and strength in the midst of almost certain peril.

Aftermath: Beyond Black Saturday

February 2019 •English

Ten years after Black Saturday, the traumatised survivors reveal how they found the strength to recover from the worst bushfire disaster in Australian history.