Mosfilm

The Mosfilm film concern is Russia’s largest film studio, producing a substantial share of the country's film, television, and video output. The studio occupies 34.5 hectares on the Sparrow Hills and holds the status of a federal state unitary enterprise. Over the course of its existence, more than 2,500 feature films have been shot here.

The studio's founding date is considered to be January 30, 1924, when the film “On Wings Aloft” premiered, although the 1st Goskino Factory itself had already been formed in November 1923 on the basis of two nationalized pre-revolutionary film factories. Over the following decade the enterprise changed its name several times, until in 1936 it finally became the Mosfilm studio. The foundation of the new complex on the Sparrow Hills, near the former settlement of Potylikha, was laid in 1927, and by 1931 the Main Building, in the Constructivist style with four spacious filming pavilions, had been erected.

The Great Patriotic War was a severe trial: nearly a thousand studio employees went to the front, 146 of whom did not return, and in the autumn of 1941 production was evacuated to Alma-Ata. Filming in Moscow resumed only in 1944, and from 1947 a scaled-down copy of Mukhina’s sculpture “Worker and Kolkhoz Woman” became the studio’s opening logo. In the 1950s, under the “Big Mosfilm” plan, the grounds were expanded to 43 hectares: in 1956–1959 two buildings in the Stalinist Empire style were erected along Mosfilmovskaya Street, and by the mid-1960s the studio occupied 54 hectares, employing about five thousand specialists.

At the turn of the 1950s–1960s, the studio developed a system of creative associations with their own names — “Vremya” (Time), “Luch” (Ray), “Tovarishch” (Comrade), “Yunost” (Youth), and others — each headed by a well-known director. Perestroika changed the enterprise’s structure: in 1987 Vladimir Dostal was elected director, and in 1990 the studio took the name Mosfilm film concern. Dostal managed to preserve the studio's base almost intact through the turbulent 1990s, and since 1998 the studio has been headed by director Karen Shakhnazarov.

Today Mosfilm operates without state subsidies, upgrading its facilities through its own revenues, and has seventeen filming pavilions and thirteen outdoor sets, including recreations of old Moscow and St. Petersburg. The studio’s collection of vintage cars and special vehicles numbers more than three hundred units. The studio also runs a museum with props from legendary films, a tour office, and a cinema, and in 2023 a new film-and-concert complex opened. In 2011 the studio was one of the first in the country to launch a YouTube channel in partnership with Google.

On the studio grounds today one can see monuments to Sergei Bondarchuk and Vasily Shukshin, the sculptures “Girl with a Clapperboard” and “Unknown Cameraman,” as well as a square named after Leonid Gaidai. Having traveled the road from a modest film factory of the 1920s to a modern production complex with surround-sound technology, Mosfilm remains a living witness to the history of Russian cinema and one of the recognizable landmarks of southwest Moscow.