6 Films & TV Shows Set In Russia During The 16th Century

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  Nova Zembla

  🇳🇱 Netherlands 🇷🇺 Russia The 16th Century

  Gerrit de Veer, a novice writer on a 16th-century Dutch merchant vessel, chronicles the daring mission to discover a trade route across the North Pole to Asia. But the heroic journey turns into tragedy when the ship gets stuck in the relentless, penetrating ice. The men are forced to spend the winter on the frozen, arctic wasteland of Nova Zembla, fighting polar bears, hunger and lethal temperatures. Their chances of making it until the following spring are virtually zero.

  Released in 2011 • 108 minutes
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  Sauna

  🇫🇮 Finland 🇷🇺 Russia The 16th Century

  Cleanse Your Sins — It is 1595. Brutal wars have just ended in an uneasy peace between Protestant Sweden and Orthodox Russia. We focus on the spiritual defeats of two conquered Finnish brothers, one a hardened near-psychopathic war hero, the other a gentle scientist in an age with no use for such men. They find themselves in the swampy interior, demarcating the new border with a unit of sadistic Russians.

  Released in 2009 • 83 minutes
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  Tsar

  🇷🇺 Russia The 16th Century

  In 16th-century Russia in the grip of chaos, Ivan the Terrible strongly believes he is vested with a holy mission. Believing he can understand and interpret the signs, he sees the Last Judgment approaching. He establishes absolute power, cruelly destroying anyone who gets in his way. During this reign of terror, Philip, the superior of the monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, a great scholar and Ivan's close friend, dares to oppose the sovereign's mystical tyranny. What follows is a clash between two completely opposite visions of the world, smashing morality and justice, God and men. A grand-scale film with excellent leading roles by Mamonov and Yankovsky. An allegory of Stalinist Russia

  Released in 2009 • 119 minutes
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  Boris Godounov

  🇷🇺 Russia The 17th Century The 16th Century

  Zulawski tackles Modest Mussorgsky’s famous opera about the bloody battle for ascendancy to the throne of Russia in the 17th-century! With a score conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich, Zulawski adds extra layers of devilish meta-textual embellishment by composing the film’s imagery as though we are watching a theater piece of a film crew making a movie about the opera of “Boris Godounov”! As well, the picture is full of delightful anachronisms that mock the then-contemporary Russian government, alongside jabs at other 20th-century dictatorships. So incensed was Rostropovich by Zulawski’s juiced final product — one that took liberties with the narrative’s sexual thrust, amongst other things — that he (unsucessfully) took Zulawski to court for “the violation of the Russian soul”! “Impressive in its use of whirling camera movements as well as mega close-ups of the contracted faces of its singers, ‘Boris Godounov’ is one of the most original opera movies ever made”

  Released in 1989 • 115 minutes
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  Ivan Vasilyevich Changes His Profession

  🇷🇺 Russia The 1970s The 16th Century

  Shurik Timofeev builds a working model of a time machine. By accident, Ivan Bunsha, an apartment complex manager, and George Miloslavsky, a petty burglar, are transferred to 16th century Moscow, while Tsar Ivan the Terrible goes into the year 1973.

  Released in 1973 • 93 minutes
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  Ivan the Terrible

  🇵🇱 Poland 🇷🇺 Russia The 16th Century

  Sergei Eisenstein’s final film, was a projected three-part historical epic/biopic on Czar Ivan Grozny commissioned by Joseph Stalin, documenting the tyrannical tsar’s rise to power and descent into paranoia and madness. Eisenstein managed to complete the first two parts of the trilogy, but the second film was banned by the USSR until 1958, halting production of the Part III. After Eisenstein’s death in 1948, most of what was filmed for Part III was seized and destroyed.

  187 minutes