6 best movies like Under the Sun (2016)

“Gorbachev. Heaven” is a documentary film about changes that reverberated throughout the world wrought by one man. A film summing-up the life of a man who changed the world in the 20th century. Gorbachev’s short time in power was marked by the collapse of this empire. He was the architect of Glasnost and Perestroika, policies that gave the citizens of the Soviet Union – what Ronald Reagan called “the Evil Empire” – a chance to be free. He tore down the Berlin Wall. But at the same time, under his rule, the Chernobyl nuclear facility exploded and its destruction was concealed. Citizens demanding independence in the Baltic states died. Soldiers wielding shovels brutally suppressed protesters in Tbilisi. And Soviet tanks menaced, and killed, peaceful demonstrators in Baku. The Soviet empire collapsed under him – and he is condemned by his own people. With this burden of the past, this lonely old man is living the last days of his life in an empty house in the suburbs near Moscow.

The cold war, the space race, and NASA’s moon landing are landmark events that defined an era. But they are also fodder for conspiracy theories. In Houston, We Have a Problem! filmmaker Žiga Virc adds new material to the discussion on both fronts. This intriguing docu-fiction explores the myth of the secret multi-billion-dollar deal behind America’s purchase of Yugoslavia’s clandestine space program in the early 1960s.

Driving in their yellow Lada flying its own little Ukrainian flag, they travel from incident to incident – calming an angry neighbor, investigating the discovery of a body, struggling to unfold a stroller and attempting to re-integrate Vova, the freeloader who eats other people’s dogs but actually longs for a normal existence – just like everyone else here. The seasons pass until political developments reach the village by way of the TV screen, sowing separatist discord.

The film tells a story about the latest musical revolution in recent history – the early days of the rave scene and the golden age of techno culture. International political changes in the mid-80s and early 90s, including the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, in a short period of time allowed this cultural phenomenon to become a mass movement which was almost completely independent from the global corporations and which did not fight with the system but created its own system.

The Man Who Saved the World is feature documentary film about Stanislav Petrov, a former lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces.

Vitaly Mansky’s intimate and insightful new documentary finds him crisscrossing the Ukraine in the wake of the Maidan uprising, which has left his relatives scattered on both sides of a highly charged and dizzyingly complex political situation.