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There's another Russian revolution afoot, albeit of the gentler cultural variety. The timing of this one couldn't be better. As countries all over the world struggle to maintain their own film cultures in the face of fierce competition by Hollywood exports - and Hollywood itself sees profit margins eroding because of piracy and the encroaching obsolescence of its business models - the movie business is starved for good news from any quarter.

Yet the former heart of the Eastern Bloc may be one of the few places on Earth where box-office receipts are actually growing - analysts are even predicting double-digit gains for the next several years. Moreover, audiences are forgoing foreign fare in favour of homegrown productions like the science-fiction/action epics Night Watch and Day Watch - which outgrossed The Lord of the Rings films in Russia - and the Mafia drama Bumer.

All in all, the film industry there may be at its most robust since Russian masters such as Eisenstein and Pudovkin established key elements of cinema's vocabulary during the silent era.

Launched this weekend in Toronto, the KINO Art Festival is a celebration of new Russian and Russian-Canadian art and cinema - screenings take place at the Royal Cinema and the John Spotton Cinema at the National Film Board. Founder and creator Alla Ani Poliakova believes it's high time for such a showcase to exist.

"The reason we wanted to do the festival was to show what's happening right now in contemporary Russian cinema, not just in features, but in documentaries, shorts and animation," she says.

"We wanted to show the full gamut of this activity. So we took many of the hits of the last year, films that went around the world and got a lot of prizes, plus some of the most recent films."

Among the highlights is the top prize winner from Rome's inaugural film festival last year. Kirill Serebrenikov's Playing the Victim is a blackly comic riff on Hamlet that recasts the Danish prince as a twentysomething slacker who acts in crime re-enactments for police investigators.

One of the newest films is Two in One, an archly Bunuelian social comedy that is the latest by Kira Muratova. This Ukrainian-born filmmaker's works were often censored during the Soviet era, yet her austere, intellectually audacious films have earned her a passionate following among cineastes internationally.

Named last year's best Russian film by a panel of the nation's critics, Free Floating is the second feature by Boris Khlebnikov, co-director of Koktebel, a favourite on the international festival circuit in 2003. Almost all of KINO's selections are making their Canadian or North American premieres.

Poliakova explains that she first wanted to put together a festival three years ago, just when the industry was heating up. That was also the year when Night Watch - based on the first of a series of popular fantasy novels by Sergei Lukyaneko about an age-old battle between supernatural groups for control of humankind - smashed box-office records in the country. The film's success confirmed a trend that began with domestic hits like Pavel Loungine's Tycoon in 2002 and Pyotr Buslov's Bumer in 2003. Russian audiences were becoming enthusiastic about their own films for the first time in recent memory.

"There was a period after the collapse of the Soviet Union when people only wanted Hollywood movies and didn't want to go to theatres," Poliakova says. "That started to change because films are showing stories that are touching people or are reflecting more of their lives."

Though the American models for many of these films are clear (for instance, Night Watch borrows freely from The Matrix, Underworld and Blade Runner), the less commercial examples remain steeped in the strong traditions of Russian cinema.

It's easy to detect the influence of the mystical, ruminative works of Andrei Tarkovsky on young directors like Andrei Zvyagintsev, whose 2003 debut The Return was a top prize winner at the Venice festival and whose 2007 follow-up, The Banishment, won an acting prize at Cannes.

Another hit at Cannes, Aleksandra confirmed Alexander Sokurov's status as one of the world's premier filmmakers, though reports of the director's declining health cast a pall over his already mournful film about a woman who visits her grandson at a military base in Chechnya.

The sheer variety of new work from Russia is more than enough justification for this addition to the city's ever-expanding array of film festivals. Poliakova not only wants to reach out to the many Torontonians of Russian heritage - which she puts at more than 300,000 - but those who have seen very little of the country as it exists today. "Many people don't even know what's happening in Russia," she says. "You can see a lot of the country in the movies."

The KINO Art Festival runs to Oct. 7. Information at kinoartfestival.com.