Russian cinema in this catalog starts in 1994, because everything before that is filed under the Soviet Union, and what it starts with is an industry in free fall. State funding vanished with the state, production dropped by roughly nine tenths, and the audience went to pirated tape. What rebuilt it was a deliberate programme in the 2000s — new multiplexes, then a state fund concentrated on a few large producers, and a very clear preference for the Great Patriotic War — while a small number of directors kept making the other kind of film, increasingly with European money.