During June in the Dryden, you’ll have a chance to experience the entire feature oeuvre of Russian filmmaker Elem Klimov; five films which include a pair of hilarious social satires and three epic-length historical dramas, almost all of which were suppressed at some point by the Soviet government.

An enormously expressive and talented writer and director, Klimov’s career was marked with controversy from the very beginning. His 1964 feature debut, Welcome, or No Trespassing, was a thinly veiled comic attack on the system set at a “Youth Pioneer” summer camp. Held back by the studio, it was only released on the orders of Premier Nikita Khrushchev, who was completely charmed by Welcome’s mix of fantasy and reality. Klimov’s 1965 follow-up, Adventures of a Dentist, satirized the Soviet practice of punishing talented individuals for the sake of preserving collective mediocrity, an unofficial policy evidenced by the fact that the studio only gave Dentist a limited release. Welcome, or No Trespassing and Adventures of a Dentist will screen in a double feature on June 5.

It was almost ten years before Klimov would complete his next film, Rasputin, a hypnotic, one-of-a-kind portrait of the legendarily depraved “mad monk” that alternates between pre-revolution documentary footage and newly filmed material. Unfortunately, it was another six years before anyone saw the film, and usually in heavily edited versions. The full-length, 152-minute cut of Rasputin will screen on June 12.

Klimov was married to his film-school sweetheart, the equally talented writer-director Larisa Shepitko, but Shepitko died tragically in a car accident on the first day of shooting her film Farewell to Matyora. Klimov took over production of Farewell (screening June 26), and the resulting film is an elegiac tribute to his beloved wife. After he completed his final and most celebrated movie, the 1986 World War II odyssey Come and See (June 22), Klimov was appointed head of the Soviet Union of Cinematographers. He then secured the release of a number of banned films and he also helped to promote new controversial efforts, becoming, like Mikhail Gorbachev, a progressive symbol of “Perestroika.” Due to bureaucratic infighting, Klimov resigned his position after only two years in 1988, and sadly never regained enough momentum to complete another feature.

From a quantitative viewpoint, Klimov left behind only a modest legacy on film when he died in October 2003, but they were films that mattered, and the same can be said for his career as an activist and leader.