Short answers, pulled from the story.
Cinema arrived in Russia in May 1896, when the Lumiere brothers exhibited films in Moscow and St. Petersburg. That same month, Lumiere cameraman Camille Cerf shot the first film made in Russia, recording the coronation of Nicholas II at the Kremlin.
The Kuleshov effect is a film editing technique developed by Lev Kuleshov, a teacher at the All Union State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. He conceived montage as an expressive process in which dissimilar images are linked together to create non-literal or symbolic meaning. His students included Sergey Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin.
Three Soviet and Russian films have won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film: War and Peace directed by Sergei Bondarchuk, Dersu Uzala directed by Akira Kurosawa as a Soviet-Japanese co-production, and Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears directed by Vladimir Menshov. Burnt by the Sun by Nikita Mikhalkov also won the award in 1994.
Andrei Tarkovsky is considered the most critically acclaimed Russian director of the 1960s and 1970s. His debut Ivan's Childhood won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival in 1962. He later won prizes at Cannes for Andrei Rublev, Stalker, Solaris, and Sacrifice, and directed the groundbreaking art-house films Mirror and Stalker.
Russian film production fell sharply throughout the 1990s as the economy deteriorated and state subsidies collapsed. Output dropped from 300 films in 1990 to just 28 in 1996. Censorship was officially abolished in 1990, but the state-controlled distribution system also collapsed, allowing Western films to dominate Russian theatres.
Cheburashka, a 2022 live-action animated children's film, is the highest-grossing Russian film of all time, earning $94.5 million at the box office. It tops the domestic chart ahead of the 2019 sports drama Going Vertical and the 2019 comedy Serf.
Major international film festivals including the Berlinale, Cannes, Venice, and Toronto banned official Russian delegations following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The European Film Awards and Emmys banned Russian films outright, and major American distributors including Disney, Sony, Paramount, and Warner Bros stopped screening films in Russia. Before the invasion, American films had made up 70 percent of the Russian film market.