Best movies from Central and Eastern Europe, 1989-2019

In the USSR in 1936, shadows of Stalin's repressions fall on a famous, revolutionary hero. The accusations of him being a foreign spy are nonsense, and everyone knows that. However, a slow process of his downfall has already started.

Two underground black marketeers, Marko and Blacky, sell weapons to the Communist resistance in wartime Belgrade, living the good life along the way.

A woman assists her friend in arranging an illegal abortion in 1980s Romania.

Matko and his son Zare live on the banks of the Danube river and get by through hustling and basically doing anything to make a living. In order to pay off a business debt Matko agrees to marry off Zare to the sister of a local gangster.

The friendship between two young women who grew up in the same orphanage; one has found refuge at a convent in Romania and refuses to leave with her friend, who now lives in Germany.

In the Russian wilderness, two brothers face a range of new, conflicting emotions when their father - a man they know only through a single photograph - resurfaces.

A Jewish-Hungarian concentration camp prisoner sets out to give a child he mistook for his son a proper burial.

Three interconnected stories of love under the threat of civil war in Macedonia and London.

In the 1950s, a music director falls in love with a singer and tries to persuade her to flee communist Poland for France.

Bosnia and Herzegovina during 1993 at the time of the heaviest fighting between the two warring sides. Two soldiers from opposing sides in the conflict, Nino and Ciki, become trapped in no man's land, whilst a third soldier becomes a living booby trap.

A novice nun about to take her vows uncovers a family secret dating back to the German occupation.

In 1992, war rages in Abkhazia, a breakaway region of Georgia. An Estonian man, Ivo, has decided to stay behind and harvest his crops of tangerines. In a bloody conflict at his door, a wounded man is left behind, and Ivo takes him in.

Occident is a bittersweet comedy that focuses on the growing tendency of Eastern European youth to migrate west. When the amicable Luci (Alexandru Papadopol) and his beautiful lover Sorina (Anca Androne) are evicted from their apartment, Sorina decides they must visit her father's grave and ask for a "sign". Seconds later, Luci is hit in the head by a bottle and taken to the hospital by a Frenchman. Despite her love for Luci, Sorina believes a life with security takes precedence over romance, and moves in with the good samaritan. Meanwhile, a jilted bride (Tania Popa) and her mother (Coca Bloos) enlist the help of of a private agency to find a proper husband for her, but the wealthy Italian man they select has more than a couple of undesirable traits. Later, Michaela's (Popa) father, a police captain, finds out that Luci's cousin is dead, prompting him to remember when the two boys fled from Romania by swimming across the Danube on an inflatable doll. The cousin had made it across, but Luci had been arrested and thrown into prison.

When slaughterhouse workers Endre and Mária discover they share the same dreams, where they meet in a forest as deer and fall in love, they decide to make their dreams come true, but it's difficult in real life.

A couple going through a divorce must team up to find their son who has disappeared during one of their bitter arguments.

A dramatization of one man's rescue of Jewish refugees in the German-occupied Polish city of Lvov.

An examination of the Soviet slaughter of thousands of Polish officers and citizens in the Katyn forest in 1940.

Twelve jurors must decide the fate of a Chechen adolescent charged with murdering his stepfather.

A confirmed bachelor is in for the surprise of his life when a get-rich-quick scheme backfires and leaves him with a pint-sized new roommate.

Through Georgi (a juvenile) and Itso (an adult), we take a quick glance (about one and a half hour quick) at what happens in post cold-war Bulgaria.

In a Russian coastal town, Kolya is forced to fight the corrupt mayor when he is told that his house will be demolished. He recruits a lawyer friend to help, but the man's arrival brings further misfortune for Kolya and his family.

Two Russian soldiers, one battle-seasoned and the other barely into his boots and uniform, are taken prisoner by an anxious Islamic father from a remote village hoping to trade them for his captured son.

At the turn of the century, a young Russian cadet falls in love with an American beauty, endangering his career and even their lives.

In the spring of 1945 the war is still going on, but in Bulgaria the communists have already seized the power. The new rulers do justice according to their personal interests. This is the beginning of the era of Communism in Bulgaria - spiritual poverty, expropriation, destroying of the intelligentsia. In this chaos the main character, an actress fallen on hard times, wants to preserve her social status with every available means. She claims to be a Communist activist and, in order to gain access to the theater even shows a photo with the Bulgarian communist revolutionary Georgi Dimitrov's dog However, in order to survive, she has to resort to betrayal.

A curious friendship develops between Gombo, a young Mongolian shepherd living with his wife and family in a hut, deep in the wilderness of the steppes, and Sergei, a Russian worker whose truck breaks down not far from Gombo's hut.