Mosfilm's YouTube account includes Dersu Uzala

It looks like the Russian film studio Mosfilm has a YouTube account that includes quite a collection of films, apparently all free to watch. Among these is Kurosawa’s Dersu Uzala. It’s with English subtitles and the quality isn’t all that bad, either.

They also seem to have Tarkovsky films like Solaris and Stalker, as well as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin.

It’s actually quite interesting to sort their list of films by popularity; I haven’t really heard of any of the top films before but they all seem to be big Soviet hit comedies from the 1970s and 80s.

That looks good – its curious that they upload so many for free when the Japanese industry (and plenty of others) seem content to sit on hundreds of old films for no obvious reason. A different business model or perhaps they just don’t see any reason not to do it?

I’m also wondering what watching this is saying to my youtube algorithms, it does send me down some interesting wormholes at times when it makes assumptions about my viewing habits.