October Revolution Island

Zbyněk Baladrán / Czech Republic, France / 2026 / World Premiere / 18 min.

synopsis

Sixty years after the Great October Socialist Revolution, a Soviet nuclear-powered icebreaker set sail for the Arctic Circle to mark this momentous historical occasion. Drawing on Galina Chubakova’s popular-science film To the Top of the Planet (1978), this work of docu-fiction engages in an imaginary dialogue with the creator of this new film, who is caught between the concepts of the past and the future.

“Communism has always seemed terrifying, and it still does. Not only did it not end, it never truly existed. It was only a spectre.”

biography

Zbyněk Baladrán (1973) is a visual artist, curator and filmmaker. He studied art history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University, and attended the Studio of Visual Communication, Painting and New Media at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague. He explores the connections between the past and its reconstruction. Ji.hlava IDFF has screened his films The Totalitarian Society of the Image (2025), In Praise of Dialectics (2021) and Catastrophe (2019).