10 great Eastern European sci-fi films

August 2025 sees the extremely belated British premiere release of Václav Vorlíček’s Who Wants to Kill Jessie? (1966), courtesy of Second Run’s Blu-ray. Anyone more accustomed to the gentler comic observations of Vorlíček’s Czechoslovak New Wave contemporaries Miloš Forman and Jiří Menzel won’t initially know what hit them when confronted with this wild farce in which three characters from the comic-strip ‘Who Wants to Kill Jessie?’ invade the real world as flesh-and-blood humans (albeit still communicating exclusively via speech bubbles that pop up above their heads).

But the film also amply qualifies as science fiction, the above-mentioned situation arising as an unintended side-effect of a process designed to make cows more productive. And the whole notion of utopian visions going disastrously wrong has always underpinned much sci-fi, perhaps especially in Eastern Europe, whose films were often made by people living in would-be utopias that in practice turned out to be anything but.

Sci-fi has always been taken noticeably more seriously east of Berlin. Writers like Stanisław Lem in Poland and the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky in Russia are major literary figures, and the fact that two-sevenths of Andrei Tarkovsky’s feature output consisted of sci-fi films is revealing enough in itself, especially when compared with the filmographies of his Western art-cinema counterparts.

This list could easily be doubled in length without sacrificing quality, and the final selection was partly dictated by a need for balance – for instance, a cap of three films per nationality, to avoid Soviet and Czechoslovak films swamping the rest. But titles that nearly made the cut included Krakatit (1948), Ikarie XB-1 (1963), Signals: A Space Adventure (1970), Solaris (1972), Pilot Pirx’s Experiment (1979), Professor Dowell’s Testament (1984), Sexmission (1984), Kin-Dza-Dza! (1986), Attraction (2017), The Man with the Magic Box (2017) and the rest of Piotr Szulkin’s filmography.

 Director: Karel Zeman

Jules Verne’s novels are among the foundational texts of the sci-fi genre, and this visually and conceptually dazzling Czechoslovak adaptation of multiple Verne novels (chiefly 1896’s Facing the Flag) pays simultaneous visual tribute to the iconic etchings of Gustave Doré.

Indeed, no other film looks quite like this one, with director-designer Karel Zeman making extensive use of his background as an animator to incorporate live actors into a world that could have been designed by Doré, down to the black-and-white quasi-engraved line drawing and hatching. Decades before the term was coined, Zeman’s film has also been cited as a pioneering piece of steampunk, for reasons that will be obvious from the first sight of Victorian-era technology standing in for a notionally futuristic weapon – this being the means by which evil Count Artigas (Miloslav Holub) plans to achieve world domination.

Zeman’s other Verne-inspired films include Journey to the Beginning of Time (1955), The Stolen Airship (1967) and On the Comet (1970), with his much-loved The Fabulous Baron Munchausen (1962) being very much a fellow traveller.

Director: Kurt Maetzig

The novels of Stanisław Lem were frequently adapted for the cinema, with other key examples including Ikarie XB-1, Transfiguration Hospital (1979), Pilot Pirx’s Experiment, the Quay brothers’ Maska (2010) and of course multiple versions of Solaris (a 1968 Soviet TV adaptation, plus the 1972 and 2002 feature films). This East German-Polish co-production was based on The Astronauts (1951), and its alternative US title The First Spaceship on Venus offers more narrative description, although that version should be avoided for those averse to crude re-editing and English redubbing.

The spaceship in question, Kosmokrator, is attempting to track down the source of a mysterious signal that appears to be emanating from Earth’s closest neighbour. Given that much American and British sci-fi of the period was suffused with Cold War paranoia, this is an unusually restrained and intelligent genre entry, with the ship’s multi-racial crew anticipating Star Trek’s by half a decade. The Venusian landscapes are impressively otherworldly and the abiding message of international co-operation is unfashionably but pleasingly at odds with all the space-race willy-waving that was going on elsewhere at the time.

Directors: Gennadi Kazansky and Vladimir Chebotaryov

If the opening scenes involving a ‘sea devil’ allegedly preying on innocent pearl fishermen suggest a flagrant rip-off of Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954), Gennadi Kazansky and Vladimir Chebotaryov’s delightful film swiftly turns into something far closer to Edward Scissorhands (1990) and The Shape of Water (2017), anticipating both by several decades. 

Because the ‘sea devil’ is actually Ichthyander (Vladimir Korenev), son of scientist Dr Salvator (Nikolay Simonov), who dreams of a utopian society beneath the waves, populated by amphibious humans, with Ichthyander intended to be merely the first.

But for all his miraculous aquatic abilities, Ichthyander is hopelessly naive on terra firma, where well-meaning gestures such as providing free fish for village locals make him the arch-enemy of the fishermen even after the initial mix-up has been clarified. Like his counterparts in the films mentioned above (and countless films with ‘Frankenstein’ in the title), his story is a powerful allegory of what happens when people are crudely ‘othered’ merely for being different. If the visual effects have dated (albeit charmingly), this core aspect certainly hasn’t.

Director: Jindřich Polák

Two films by Czechoslovakia’s Jindřich Polák qualify for this list: the wholly serious Ikarie XB-1 and this much-loved farce, which is one of the best-known examples of the genre that Who Wants to Kill Jessie? helped kickstart: the bonkers Czechoslovak sci-fi comedy. Other key titles include Oldřich Lipský’s I Killed Einstein, Gentlemen (1969), The Mysterious Castle in the Carpathians (1981) and Hearty Greetings from the Globe (1982), and Václav Vorlíček’s You Are a Widow, Sir! (1971) and How About a Plate of Spinach? (1977).

Polák’s film opens in the 1990s, when time travel is an option for well-heeled tourists. But some elderly Nazis hijack the technology in order to give Hitler a neutron bomb in 1944, a cunning plan that’s thwarted by a series of coincidences, such as their intended pilot being switched at the last minute by his identical twin and decidedly non-Nazi-sympathising brother. Frequent laughs notwithstanding, it’s one of the more intelligent films about time-travel paradoxes, no doubt stemming from its source story by renowned sci-fi writer Josef Nesvadba.

Director: Andrei Tarkovsky

Now a regular fixture on Sight and Sound’s decennial Greatest Films polls, Andrei Tarkovsky’s second sci-fi film (after Solaris) was loosely based on the Strugatsky brothers’ 1972 novel Roadside Picnic. It’s set in and around a mysterious Zone whose nature is so baffling to the authorities that they cordon it off – but intrepid guides known as ‘stalkers’ are prepared to illegally accompany people investigating a pervasive rumour that the heart of the Zone harbours a mysterious room where one’s true innermost desire will be granted.

As much a philosophical work as a genre piece, Stalker painstakingly tracks every trepidatious trudge taken by the title character (Aleksandr Kaidanovsky) and his companions, known only as the Writer (Anatoly Solonitsyn) and the Professor (Nikolai Grinko) through a landscape that’s part industrial hellhole (whose carcinogenic properties are thought to have prematurely shortened the lives of several cast and crew members, Tarkovsky included), part oasis of weirdly compelling beauty. 

Director: Dušan Vukotić

Karel Zeman wasn’t the only great animator to end up making live-action sci-fi; this Czechoslovak-Yugoslav co-production boasts two, in the form of Yugoslav and Montenegrin animator Dušan Vukotić as overall director (his Cow on the Moon from 1959 is a classic animated sci-fi short) and the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, responsible for the show-stopping set-piece featuring the Mumu, a bipedal cross between an anteater, an elephant and a Giuseppe Arcimboldo assemblage of giant shells, which sprays lurid green poison in self-defence.

The Mumu’s visit is just one of the visions that plagues sci-fi novelist Robert (Žarko Potočnjak), who initially believes that his imaginary trips to the equally imaginary Arkana galaxy remained precisely that. But, as Who Wants to Kill Jessie? had already amply demonstrated, fantastical characters and settings have a habit of transforming into three-dimensional reality. This is especially awkward in the case of an attractive Arkana alien (Ksenija Prohaska) whose presence is strongly resented by Robert’s real-life girlfriend Biba (Lucié Žulová), who insults her as “an eroticised bag of bolts” and “a tractor”. Ouch!

Director: Piotr Szulkin

Aside from On the Silver Globe (1988) and the overtly comedic Sexmission, Polish dystopian sci-fi was virtually a one-man genre, although Piotr Szulkin preferred ‘asocial fiction’. Any of his 1980s films could be cited here – the others being Golem (1980), O-bi, O-ba: The End of Civilisation (1984) and Ga-Ga: Glory to the Heroes (1986) – but War of the Worlds: Next Century may be the perfect introduction to his mordantly pessimistic worldview.

The film’s double dedication is to H.G. and Orson Well(e)s, both of whom Szulkin simultaneously channels by dramatising a turn-of-the-21st-century Martian invasion (sorry, “friendly visit”) and by showing how the Martians, in league with gullible and/or Machiavellian humans, manipulate the media so comprehensively that even the supposedly clued-up TV presenter Iron Idem (Roman Wilhelmi) doesn’t know what’s really going on. Naturally, all attempts at honest fact-checking are abruptly impeded by increasingly Kafkaesque officialdom.

Following its autumn 1981 premiere, the film belatedly opened in Poland in 1983, by which time much of it looked like satirical commentary on the country’s then-recent martial-law crackdown – which Szulkin had anticipated with unnerving prescience.

Director: Andrzej Żuławski

Someone once fantasised about how sci-fi cinema might have panned out if Andrzej Żuławski’s film had been 1977’s big genre-blockbuster instead of Star Wars – though we’re lucky to have On the Silver Globe at all, as production that year was abruptly shut down by a horrified Polish Ministry of Culture. Żuławski subsequently fashioned a releasable version from what survived (he’d shot about 80% of the script), but he made a point of highlighting missing sections, as much for polemical as explicatory reasons.

Based on the first instalment of his great-uncle Jerzy’s celebrated ‘Lunar Trilogy’ (1903 to 1911), Żuławski’s film is set in the distant future on a planet that’s populated by a mixture of the native species, telepathic bird-creatures called Sherns, and descendants of human astronauts who have established their own primitive civilisation and religion. When fellow astronaut Marek (Andrzej Seweryn) pays them a visit, he is worshipped as a demigod – at least at first. Like all Żuławski films, it’s a visual knockout and confrontational in the extreme, as much for the endless stream of ideas as for its frequently graphic content.

Director: Marcell Jankovics

Eastern European cinema has traditionally been very strong on animation, and there’s duly been plenty of animated sci-fi, with other feature-length films including The Mystery of the Third Planet (1981), Chronopolis (1982), Delta Space Mission (1984), The Son of the Stars (1988), Lajka (2017) and the scabrous Polish black comedy George the Hedgehog (2011). But for sheer ambition this millennia-spanning Hungarian epic, adapted from Imre Madách’s celebrated 1861 play (regarded locally as their Paradise Lost), dwarfs all comers. 

Spanning human civilisation from Biblical creation to future utopias and dystopias, narrative continuity is provided by Adam and Eve, accompanied by Lucifer, who literally plays devil’s advocate throughout by flagging up when well-meaning initiatives throughout history (or an imaginary future) might have unintended, sometimes devastating consequences.

Its 160 minutes allow plenty of time for individual episodes to breathe – indeed, writer-director Marcell Jankovics was able to steer production through the financial ravages of the immediate post-Communist era by conceiving the film as separate episodes. But when viewed intact the film’s overarching ambition and abiding pessimism come into sharp focus. 

Director: Aleksei German

Another long-gestating sci-fi project was this gargantuan three-hour adaptation of the Strugatsky brothers’ eponymous 1964 novel. Six years of shooting was followed by six years of post-production, with director Aleksei German dying towards the end – although thankfully this was more of an Eyes Wide Shut (1999) than an On the Silver Globe situation, as the most crucial creative decisions had already been taken.

It’s set on a distant planet named Arkanar, whose inhabitants are broadly akin to medieval Europeans, living nasty, brutish and mostly short lives surrounded by mud and squalor. Visiting Earth scientists are surreptitiously living among them, observing how the society progresses (or doesn’t), and Rumata (Leonid Yarmolnik) occasionally tries to shift things in certain directions, notably by protecting people with the capacity to read, write and think.

But that’s all that he can do, and otherwise he – and we – have to look on appalled as the forces of darkness very much hold sway. As a squelching, almost tactile vision of hell, German’s film ranks alongside the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch.