WINGS OVER BERLIN
A WW2 HEROIC STORY
Since Hollywood is sleeping currently, your trusted spy is, as usual, taking you on a trip around the world to see new productions from all corners of the globe,
so after informing you about the new projects from Denmark, Hungary and Australia earlier this week, we are today moving to the Eastern Europe with two new historical movies. First one is coming from Russia celebrating their brave, heroic past. WINGS OVER BERLIN (Крылья над Берлином) already flew through their cinemas earlier this April coming from their celebrated director Konstantin Buslov whom we mentioned last year here as the helmer of another World War II movie
Kalashnikov about the inventor of their famous riffle which, invented to spread death among the enemy, actually saved many lives.
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| Wings over Berlin aired this April in Russia |
Kalashnikov about the inventor of their famous riffle which, invented to spread death among the enemy, actually saved many lives.
WINGS OVER BERLIN
starring
Evgeniy Antropov, Aleksandr Metyolkin and Sergei Puskepalis, is a
touching war romance and adventure bringing the story of the feat of the
pilots of the 1st mine torpedo aviation regiment of the Baltic
Fleet
Air Force, headed by Colonel Preobrazhensky (Maksim Bityukov). They had
the most difficult combat mission - to inflict the first bombing strikes
on Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany.
Fleet
Air Force, headed by Colonel Preobrazhensky (Maksim Bityukov). They had
the most difficult combat mission - to inflict the first bombing strikes
on Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany. MELCHIOR THE APOTHECARY
ESTONIA'S MOST EXPENSIVE HISTORICAL FILM EVER
Moving up North to neighbouring Estonia, we have their most expensive historical movie ever, and also the most ambitious one as it has been envisioned
as a trilogy to be released from April till late summer: MELCHIOR THE APOTHECARY a medieval drama based on a seven book series by Estonian writer Indrek Hargla! Directed by Elmo Nuganen, this medieval crime thriller has the story revolving around a Tallinn pharmacist who has to uncover the secret behind a terrible wave of murders that threatens to wreck the entire Christian world. When a murderer is loose in town, the town is sick. It's time to call the apothecary. Märten Metsaviir
leads the movie as Melchior Wakenstede!
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| Melchior also aired in cinemas this April |
Yess, Dear Trusted Spy, keep up your sleuthing job. I am now certain, the best period pieces are made in Continental Europe and yet they are not marketed properly. What’s the use of spending money if only your locals will watch them? I feel they have not much respect for their televised products, not like Americans and British have. Even in Spain they don’t advertise their stuff. My Spanish friends are into what you call Hollywood products and look down on their own.
ReplyDeleteI’m not much into movies so I’ll bypass the Russian flick. Moreover, Tubi has at least two miniseries on the subject. I’ve only seen Madame K from Estonia and loved it dearly. I look forward to this one, but if it is a trilogy, they should have turned it into a mineries, like the Russians did with Gogol.
Russians do advertise their stuff as they have a number of very popular movie sites like IMDB. I actually frequent both Russian and French versions of IMDB as they are very nice. It is very shameful that a lot of people in Europe look down on their own movies and prefer the Hollywood ones. That is not so in Russia and Serbia where our domestic projects always go better than the foreign ones.
DeleteI am preparing a post on all the period set French movies we can expect in the future, so you can look forward to that one :) and I already have a post on one of them set with photos. And also on another fresh period set Russian movie.
Yes, the Russians know how to sell themselves, entertainment speaking. At least they did until this war. Epic Media, Star Media and Other Russian production companies have their own channels in YT, and you can see their products with subtitles in like five languages, Spanish included. The quality is not the best, the translation can be awful, but you get to see most of what they have made in the last 10-12 years.
DeleteIn America we also have Tubi that carries almost every Russian period piece of the last decade, good quality and good translation. However, other streaming companies haven’t bought Russian miniseries at least since 2019. I’ve only seen one Russian series in Netflix, and this was in 2018.
I’m so glad Serbians care about their products, but I haven’t seen them around much. MHz is showing The Family (Porodica) about Milosevic, should I watch it? Thanks to Tubi, I got to watch Shadows over the Balkans, but I had to pay Amazon to see the second season. I was under the impression that Scent of Rain was Croatian. I realized now it was Serbian, and you should be proud. Last time, I only watched a couple of episodes and judged it harshly. Now, after the Beauty Queen of Jerusalem fiasco, I needed to see a story that showed my people in a good light, and your people did it. I also read about the bestseller and how it has been translated to several languages like Spanish, and yet the series hasn’t been translated. I found it in MHz choice and apparently the English subtitle were added only in 2018.
But those series on YouTube are not their best, they don't offer the cream of their production there, so have that in mind. I hope we will manage to dig Elizaveta somewhere, but I'm not optimistic. I found only Aeterna epic series that aired in January, but no subs, sadly.
DeleteFamily was a hit here, but people complained that they weren't harsh enough towards those two monsters. A couple of our new series are being offered at TV festivals currently, we have Dubrovnik TV market soon. Beta has bought intern. rights for that Ukrainian series Coffee with Cardamom, so we might find that one somewhere too. The Scent of Rain was an adaptation of one of our most popular novels, yes. Currently Bad Blood is on Netflix, but only in Europe, methinks. There was a series shot in my city, called KLJUN, that won an award last year at Cannes. We have an extremely rich production, at every point we have at least a dozen or more shows in production and also airing. Maybe you can find Santa Maria dela Salute series, it was period set, based on one of our most famous poems ever.
PS we traditionally love Jews as we have identical historical story of being the forever victims of genocide and of Muslim aggression. The only thing that makes us different is that you prefer USA and we Russia :) Even the situation in Israel is very similar to what we have at terrorist occupied Kosovo.
DeleteReally? Because I enjoyed some of them like Spies, The Wolf’s Sun, Neophyte. I saw Velikaya in YT before Tubi bought it. What have I missed? Remember, period drama is my priority.
DeleteOhhh Santa Maria Della Salute looks so good and so does Coffee with Cardamon.
What can I say? USA has been good to Israel and despite the current rise of antisemitism, Jews have thrived on this land. The Soviet Union was detrimental to Jewish culture and Jewish lives. In fact, most Russian Jews today have no inkling of what Judaism or Jewish culture are. I went to school with refuseniks and heard all about their plight and how hard it was to live in Russia and how hard it was to leave. You’ll understand this, because Serbia has endured it for centuries, occupied by invaders that wanted to reform it, reshape it into something else, erase the national culture. When you take away culture, and the word encompasses so much, ethnicity loses its meaning. No cultural identity = death in life.
I
Well, Sofia, Godunov, both seasons, Grozniy, these were their biggest shows next to Catherine, but unlike Catho did not have YouTube release.
DeleteEven Russians had it rough in Russia at certain times, not just Jews. I read somewhere that during the worst of Stalin's communism up to 30 million Russians were killed in camps or exile or Siberia. A prick he was. I've just read Cathedral del Mar to write a review for our biggest publisher, and Jews were treated like garbage in the medieval Barcelona. Not only that they were secluded in a special part of the city, but nobody even talked to them and they would occasionally break into their part of the city just to have some 'fun' killing and hunting them. Of course, they were not as much disgusted by their money when they needed to borrow some from them.
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DeleteTubi ha Sophia, Godunov and Ekaterina. I haven’t been able to find that Ivan the Terrible yet.
DeleteI’m not one to think Jews are the only victims in the world. Stalin killed more people than Hitler, but then he was in power forever. To think of all those children, he starved to death in the Holodomor, and the purges that decimated his generals and high officers. His army almost had no leaders to confront the German invasion. He played the “I’m not antisemitic” card. Although never been proven, there was a rumour that he had married a Jewish woman (Rosa Kaganovich) He had two Jewish torturers heading his NKVD, Yagoda and Yezhov. But after Trotsky’s defection, Stalin got paranoid thought all Jews were Trotskyites. After the war, and although he voted for the creation of Israel, he changed his tune and thought many Jewish leaders in his orbit were Zionist agents or just tools of western propaganda. He had many purges of Jews, like the thirteen executed in the Night of Murdered Poets (1952). The alleged Doctor’s plot had Jewish and non-Jewish doctors imprisoned tortured and executed, but there was a plan to deport Jews from large cities and there was a media campaign to create social unrest against the Jewish population. Stalin’s death stopped it.
Beware of the Ildefonso Falcones book, it is a propaganda pamphlet against the Aragon kingdom and a call for Catalonian secession. Yes, Jews had an awful time in medieval Barcelona and in major cities of the Aragon and the Castile Kingdoms, but at least they could dwell there, unlike in England, France and Hungary and other countries that had expelled them altogether. In fact, the 1492 Spanish expulsion was one the last of its kind. Awful as it was, the Catholic Kings were pressured into following the example of neighboring nations. The Cathedral includes tremendous fallacies like they have Rabbi Crescas burned at the stake. Hasdai Crescas, Baruj Hashem, died in his bed.
Yes, Jews lived in the juderia/Aljama/Call, but real segregation began after the 1391 massacre. Jews were segregated in most large towns throughout Europe since Prague instituted the first ghetto in 1098. On the other hand, by the end of the XVIII century when most European nations were talking about emancipating their Jewish population, our Velikaya created a system that would be the worst in Europe until the Nazi period.
I’m talking about the Pale of Settlement. It covered the Ukraine, parts of Poland and Russia, Belarus, and Lithuania. Jews were deported there, but could not inhabit large cities like Vilnius, Minsk, or Kiev. In villages they were locked in ghettos and were not allowed to go out at night (watch Fiddler on the Roof). They were forbidden to travel or settle outside that area. Only the very rich could buy that privilege, and most Jewish population was poor. If a woman or girl wanted to travel outside the Pale, she had to buy the Yellow Ticket which was issued for prostitutes, exposing them thus to molestation and rape. Young men had another problem, the Russian Army would kidnap them in their early teens, recruit them and force them to eat pork and give up their religion throughout their service.
Since Jews were caged in that area for over a century, it was open season on them throughout the year. The amount and brutality of pogroms drove Jews to immigrate in mass to Western Europe, USA, what is now Israel and Argentina. So, it was this wave of antisemitism that created Zionism and pushed many Russian Jews to clandestine revolutionary action and leftist ideologies.
1391? See, that is another thing Jews and Serbs have in common, as in 1389 we had the famous Kosovo battle against the Turks and it decided our history later on.
DeleteIs Catalonian secession a bad thing necessarily? I wouldn't mind if my Vojvodina became independent, so that is why I ask, I often support secession when it is logical and just, not always of course. This is why Spain is one of the countries that have not acknowledged the existence of the terrorist separatist region of Kosovo.
You asked a good question. I don’t seem to have a position in the matter, but this is what I see. Secession is bad for both. Spain will lose her most prosperous region, a great venue for tourism, one of the most important ports in the Mediterranean, etc. Catalonian secession will set a precedent for other Spanish regions to secede, dismembering a land that has been united since 1492.
DeleteCatalonia (despite what series like The Cathedral… and Knightfall say) has never been an independent kingdom. On her own, she will face unprecedented challenges. She will not be part of the EU, NATO, won’t have an army and other resources that Spain provides for now. Many of her famed enterprises, companies and industry will move to Spain, taking their capital with them. Catalonia will just be a small country fighting by herself.
I did manage to erase the unedited post. I apologize again.
The West support to the secession of terrorist occupied Kosovo already set a dangerous precedent, Gatofilla, they did that and the bombing of Serbia without official UN permission, and that way they opened the Pandora's Box. Putin then used the very same excuse to anex Crimea, using the same weapon that the West invented. So it is only a matter of time when other regions will try the same.
DeleteAre the Catalonians very much different from Spaniards?
yes and now. They are very similar to people from Valencia and the Baleares. Their lenguage is like old Occitan, but they are very different from Galician and Basques , other regions that want to secede. I wonder what Kossovo would live on if they do become independent. I imagine eventually Macedonia or Albania will annex it. When it comes to standing on their own, the economy should be the first priority rather than talks of language and culture.
DeleteThey are already independent and very poor. There is a lot of drug trafficking there, they are like European Colombia. Clinton wanted a drug haven in Europe and he got it. Macedonia cannot annex anything, they are helpless and will be taken over by Albanians as well. Albania has a dream of creating a Great Albania by annexing Kosovo and Macedonia and some parts of Serbia.
DeleteMelchior looks a bit gruesome, but one I'd like to watch anyway. I love a good murder mystery!
ReplyDeleteI've heard it is boring as hell LOL I mean how can you make a trilogy about an apothecary? Not exactly the most exciting job in the world.
DeleteOoof, then I may just skip that one if it's boring. Then again, the apothecary could be the sneaky bastard killing everyone, so that could add to the excitement?
DeleteNot this one, sadly.
DeleteSorry to interfere, but apothecaries in ancient times were powerful beings, magicians, doctors, alchemists, most of the renaissance occultists were apothecaries (Paracelsus, Nostradamus, and John Dee).
DeleteBet they were dentists as well LOL
DeleteThe Russian film for the win! I love when you take us around the world. Although, I agree that a murder bust solved by a pharmacist may be a tad boring.
ReplyDeleteNext up is some French movies coming up soon. But first something Latino on Sunday.
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