Years back, a cameraman friend of the filmmaker Adam Curtis stumbled upon 10,000 hours of unedited footage shoved in a cupboard in the BBC’s Moscow office. Filmed across the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1999, the rushes evoked the bizarre, nihilistic world of a failing power. Curtis had no idea what to do with the archive. But last year, a lightning bolt. Instead of squeezing the footage into some other project or story, why not let it tell its own tale? The result is a timely seven-part series that presents, as Curtis described it in the Financial Times, “the weird stew that created Putin.” Five months after he started working on the film, Putin invaded Kyiv. —Clara Molot