Unearthed masterpieces, documentaries and animated oddities are all on the bill for the Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival.

Now in its third year and named for the dissemination of censored and banned materials in former Eastern Bloc states, the festival will run at the Glasgow Film Theatre, CCA Glasgow and Summerhall Edinburgh from October 1 to 5.

Samizdat will begin at the GFT with a screening of animations from the late period of the Cold War on October 1.

Animations include a yeti in Kazakhstan listening to the B-52s, a man selling his own face to buy a lottery ticket and surgery being performed on a bust of Joseph Stalin.

The animation screening will be followed by a free-entry Opening Night celebration at the CCA Glasgow’s Third Eye Bar, featuring Samizdat-themed cocktails and a DJ set by Kernius Linkevicius.

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On October 4 the GFT will show a special screening of Sanatorium pod klepsydrą (The Hourglass Sanatorium), a Polish surrealist film dubbed a "psychedelic classic".

Other films showing include Spalovač mrtvol (The Cremator), a Czechoslovak film set in 1930s Prague which sees Karel Kopfrkingl, a seemingly mild-mannered crematorium worker, who becomes obsessed with Nazi ideology and begins to see his work as a divine mission to 'save' humanity by sending souls to the afterlife.

The 1989 Soviet film Прикосновение​ (The Touch) will be shown for the first time with its original English subtitles.

Set in the Kazakh steppe, it tells of a nomadic blind girl with prophetic abilities who meets a fugitive slave.

Samizdat runs an annual Ukrainian film programme, and this year will be showing the short film In The Noise of a Downpour followed by Фото на пам’ять (A Picture to Remember), which sees the ongoing war narrated through the voices of three generations of women: a grandmother in occupied Donbass, a mother studying parasites one floor above a morgue in Kyiv, and a daughter trying to make sense of reality through a camera lens.

The 2024 documentary Мирнi Люди (Intercepted) is composed of long shots of landscapes and interiors devastated by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, overlaid with a voiceover of telephone conversations between Russian soldiers and their families that were intercepted in 2022 by the Ukrainian Secret Service.

Samizdat will also host a screening of The Balcony Movie (Film Balkonowy) (2021), a unique Polish documentary comprised of director Paweł Łoziński’s conversations with random pedestrians passing by his Warsaw flat’s balcony.

Curator and festival director Harriet Idle has said: “I think that this year’s programme is truly special and offers something for everyone — whether you’re a devout horror fan, have a love for animation, or want to discover some of the artistic richness produced from this part of the world. It’s such a joy for us to showcase some really absorbing, visually stunning films that don’t always receive the visibility they deserve in Scotland.”

Dylan Beck, Samizdat’s new guest curator, says: “I’ve previously enjoyed the festival as an audience member, and it’s been a pleasure to join Samizdat as a guest curator for its third iteration! I’m excited to be introducing a couple of Baltic cinema classics and look forward to watching other curators’ picks. It’s great to see the interest in films from the region growing — and with it the event, too!’

Festival manager Ilia Ryzhenko adds: “Now that the festival has entered its third year, we are less restricted by the need to prove that there is a real demand for cinema from the ‘Wider Eastern Europe’, including other post-socialist spaces. This allows us to really play to our strengths, experimenting with different formats, events, genres, and bringing our screenings to venues outside of Glasgow and Edinburgh.”