The Daydreams Database of pre-Soviet films is the first scholarly database of feature films produced in the Russian Empire and films shot in its former territories in the first years after the October Revolution. It contains the most complete filmographies, synopses, iconographic materials (such as promotional stills, posters, and frame enlargements), and video clips for more than 2,500 films. This unique bilingual online database will become an essential tool for film historians, Slavic scholars, and everyone interested in early cinema.
The database is being built based on a wide range of sources, including early 20th-century film periodicals and archival collections. The goal of this database is to bring together as many sources for each film as possible. This approach will allow scholars to get a much more comprehensive picture of the cinema of the period from which the absolute majority of films are considered lost (non-extant), which means that no prints of these films have survived.