DIPLOMACY: With a gently satirical outer wrapping and a deadly serious inner core, Arthur Franck’s account of the seminal Helsinki Agreement of 1975—The Helsinki Effect—demonstrates just how historic a diplomatic process that was at the time seen as tedious and irrelevant really was.
AUTHORITARIANISM: What happened after the height of freedom ideals, the fall of the Iron Curtain and Bill Clinton’s fusion of liberal politics with market forces? Today, the Chinese’s mastery of original Western technology and surveillance seems limitless.
COMMUNISM: The banality of evil in communist-era Poland explored through archive footage of secret police audio and film recordings.
BIOGRAPHY: «Why are you a problematic pop star? » director Stephen Loveridge asks M.I.A. in his documentary. The answers provided by the film point towards more than an uncompromising and sometimes challenging personality.
RUSSIA: Meeting Gorbachev is an intimate and engaging portrait of the man who unwittingly prompted the collapse of the Soviet Union.
USSR: Vivid memories of home-made psychedelic drugs and Soviet revolutionary times are brought to life in Soviet Hippies.
A documentary from the time when American films portrayed Soviet commissionaires changing sides to betray communist ideals, and Soviet television showed CIA agents gunning down innocent comrades.