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The Sound of Soviet Rock
By Vladimir Kozlov
A new interest in the former lead singer of cult band Zvuki Mu has inspired a book about the rock group.
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A Year at the Opera
By Raymond Stults
Moscow's biggest opera houses have returned to work with an interesting season ahead of them. On show will be old classics as well as new productions. Raymond Stults reports.
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Emotions in the Ring
By Tom Birchenough
While "Stonehead" is a subtle and unexpected film, the same cannot be said of the new, inappropriate Russian comedy "Hitler Kaput."
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Beauty and Her Beast
By John Freedman
Konstantin Raikin is not one to rest on his laurels. It wasn't all that long ago, maybe five or six years back, that he had built up one of the strongest troupes in Moscow.
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Image
By Marina Kamenev
The Moscow House of Photography dedicates an exhibition to the Beijing Olympics.
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Wanted
By Kevin O'Flynn
It is one of the first ads in the "Others" section, looking for "girls and boys" without complexes.
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Salon
By Victor Sonkin
A new publishing house was created - Knizhnoe Obozrenie, whose main purpose will be to promote reading.
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Drugoe Kino
"Keep Smiling," from Latvia, examines the legacy of the two world wars.
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Western Perspectives
A festival of EU documentaries tells stories from the former Soviet Union.
By Anna Malpas
Published: April 22, 2005
In a festival of documentary films from the European Union, many of the works are focused on Russian themes -- from Yevgeny Khaldei, the photographer who snapped Soviet soldiers raising the flag over the Reichstag, to the fate of the Soviet Union's largest aircraft carrier.
This year the annual Panorama of Cinema from the Nations of the European Union festival concentrates on documentaries. Running to Wednesday at the Illyuzion movie theater on Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya, the festival features a variety of international perspectives on the Soviet past and Russians abroad.
On Saturday there will be a chance to see Marc-Henri Wajnberg's 1997 profile of the Tass and Pravda photographer Yevgeny Khaldei, who shot iconic images of Soviet leaders and the famous 1945 picture of Red Army soldiers dangling the Soviet flag from the roof of the Reichstag in Berlin. The Belgian director traveled to Moscow to interview Khaldei, who died the year that the film was released.
The aircraft carrier "Kiev" was once the largest Soviet warship, but was subsequently sold to China for display in a theme park. Austrian director Johannes Holzhausen shot a 2001 documentary called "On the Seven Seas," following the ship's final journey from Murmansk to Shanghai. The 95-minute film, which includes interviews with the ship's former crew members, will be shown Saturday.
Panorama's organizers selected six films from the Baltic states, which joined the European Union last May. These include Latvian director Laila Pakalnina's "Dream Land," a 35-minute film following the everyday lives of the animal and insect inhabitants of a garbage dump, and a profile of a lonely Lithuanian farmer and his attachment to a pig called Caesar by Janina Lapinskaite, called "The Life of Venecijus and Caesar's Death," both of which play Friday.
Young men unearth the remains of fallen soldiers from two world wars in Latvian filmmaker Askolds Saulitis' 2004 documentary "Keep Smiling," also to be shown Friday. The director used a handheld camera to follow a group of four men who search for missing soldiers' bodies, which are then reburied in marked graves. The film won several prizes in Latvia for its portrayal of a country coming to terms with its history of occupation.
In a 2003 film called "The Way to the West," Greek director Kyriakos Katzourakis focused on Irina, an emigre from an unspecified CIS country who fell victim to sex traffickers and ended up in Greece. The documentary won a FIPRESCI critics' award at the 2003 Thessaloniki Documentary Festival.
The Panorama of Documentary Film from the Nations of the European Union festival runs to Wednesday at Illyuzion, located at 1/15 Kotelnicheskaya Naberezhnaya. Metro Taganskaya. Tel. 915-4353/4339. The films are shown in the original language with translation into Russian by headphones. For showtimes, see www.euro.drugoe-kino.ru/program.html.
Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times. All rights reserved.
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September 26 - October 2, 2008 
