East Side Story is a 1997 documentary directed by Dana Ranga.
[1] The film documents the Soviet Bloc musical genre, which first appeared under Stalin and spread to Soviet-occupied Eastern Europe.
[2] The film first looks at Grigori Alexandrov, a director who made his career in the 1930s musicals.
He directed the unlikely hit Jolly Fellows (1934), which had the backing of Maxim Gorky and the personal approval of Stalin.
Many of the films were quite popular, but relatively few were made because their themes did not fit comfortably with the canons of Socialist realism.