timespace coordinates: 1941 Kaunas, Lithuania amid Stalin’s reign of terror in the Baltic region > Soviet labor camp (Siberia) > the Arctic Circle
Ashes in the Snow is a World War II drama film directed by Marius A. Markevicius based on The New York Times best selling novel Between Shades of Gray by Ruta Sepetys. It stars Bel Powley, Martin Wallström, Lisa Loven Kongsli, Jonah Hauer-King, Peter Franzén and Sophie Cookson. (wiki)
Home is a 2009 French documentary film by Yann Arthus-Bertrand. The film is almost entirely composed of aerial shots of various places on Earth. It shows the diversity of life on Earth and how humanity is threatening the ecological balance of the planet. The English version was read by Glenn Close.
The film was financed by Kering, a French multinational holding company specializing in retail shops and luxury brands, as part of their public relations strategy. (wiki)
Yann Arthus-Bertrand said in a TED talk that the movie has no copyright.
spacetime coordinates: 2035 Shanghai Tokyo Los Angeles Sydney / Siberia
Pacific Rim Uprising is a 2018 American science fiction film directed by Steven S. DeKnight (in his feature-film directorial debut), with a screenplay by DeKnight, Emily Carmichael, Kira Snyder, and T.S. Nowlin, from a story by DeKnight and Nowlin. It is the sequel to the 2013 film Pacific Rim, with Guillermo del Toro, the director of the original, serving as a producer. The sequel stars John Boyega (also making his producer debut), as well as Scott Eastwood, Cailee Spaeny, Jing Tian, Adria Arjona, and Zhang Jin, with Rinko Kikuchi, Charlie Day, and Burn Gorman returning from the original film.
Pacific Rim Uprising is a springboard for a cinematic universe, where DeKnight revealed “If enough people show up to this, we’ve already talked about the plot of the third movie, and how the end of the third movie would expand the universe to a Star Wars/Star Trek-style [franchise or series] where you can go in many, many different directions… You can go main canon, you can go spin-offs, you can go one-offs. Yeah, that’s the plan.” DeKnight also talked about the possibility of a crossover with the MonsterVerse, as co-writer T.S. Nowlin is a member of its writers room.
spacetime coordinates: 2010’s remote Alaska
“Set in murky Alaska, but filled with soft, southern accented characters, it takes place in a tiny, forgotten place, where people struggle for money, hide their histories, wear baseball caps, drive pickups, move at a snail’s pace, and settle their matters in a violent fashion. At the centre of a nifty noire tangle is an uncomfortable buddy-buddy relationship between an aw-shucks former rodeo star trying unsuccessfully to live a low-key life as a motel owner, and a troubled, snaky hit man. “ js-66130
the Way Back is a 2010 survival drama film directed by Peter Weir, from a screenplay by Weir and Keith Clarke. The film is inspired by The Long Walk (1956), the memoir by former Polish prisoner of war Sławomir Rawicz, who claimed to have escaped from a Soviet Gulag and walked 4,000 miles to freedom in World War II. The film stars Jim Sturgess, Colin Farrell, Ed Harris, and Saoirse Ronan, with Alexandru Potocean, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Gustaf Skarsgård, Dragoş Bucur and Mark Strong.
Regardless of whether or not this particular “long walk” really took place, during World War II other Poles undertook difficult journeys attempting to leave the Soviet Union. Accounts of their escapes can be found in the archives of the Polish Institute and Sikorski Museum in London, and in the Hoover Institute at Stanford University, in California. Also, several relatively verifiable and believable escapee autobiographies have been published in English, e.g., Michael Krupa’s Shallow Graves in Siberia.
Many of the events that happen in the gulag scenes come from Varlam Shalamov’s The Kolyma Tales. (read/download PDF here)
The Edge (Russian: Край) is a 2010 Russian drama film directed by Alexei Uchitel.
TimeSpace Warps 