Its history dates back to 1908, when a St. Petersburg businessman, Vladislav Karpinsky, opened the "Omnium Film" film studio, which produced documentaries and feature films for local theatres.
However, its official founding date is considered to be 1918, when the Bolsheviks nationalized the studio and shot their first film there.
In Soviet times, many prominent filmmakers, writers, and actors were active at the studio, including Sergei Eisenstein, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Iosif Kheifets, and many others. The studio was renamed Lenfilm in 1934 after bearing several names, including The Petrograd Cinema Committee, in the years after the Bolshevik Revolution.
The Bronze Horseman - a monument to Peter the Great - became the Lenfilm logo in 1965 and is featured at the start of all of its films.
The first Soviet-American film, The Blue Bird, was made at Lenfilm in 1976 and starred. Elizabeth Taylor and Jane Fonda along with Russian movie stars.
Lenfilm, Russia's second largest studio after Moscow's Mosfilm, produced some 1,500 films in the Soviet period, including classics such as Hamlet, Peter I, the Queen of Spades, the Lady with the Dog, the Amphibian Man, Chapayev, and Zolushka (an adaption of Cinderella).
President Vladimir Putin congratulated the studio on its anniversary saying that, "Lenfilm has been traveling down a bright creative path for many decades and has turned into a major center of the Russian film industry," the Kremlin press office said.
Despite its glorious past, Lenfilm is currently going through a difficult period and has been the subject of a takeover bid with the aim of utilizing the prime real estate plot the studio occupies.
