Director Gabe Polsky's acclaimed Red Army documentary is loaded with cool archival Soviet footage. You can get a glimpse of some of it in this trailer.

The Hockey News

In the post-screening interview he conducted with the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival, Red Army director Gabe Polsky said he reviewed about 10 percent of the archival hockey footage made available to him. The vault, it turns out, is massive.

We can only imagine the gems still to be unearthed in the remaining 90 percent, because what viewers are treated to in the 76-minute chronicle is a series of fascinating visual revelations.

We're exposed to the "other side"; the formative years of the program through Anatoli Tarasov, the unique training methods, clips from Soviet TV, Slava Fetisov on home video.

If you're a hardcore hockey fan, you may know the history of Russian hockey intimately, but Red Army breathes new life into the tale by spinning it on its axis and projecting it from the other side. It also sets it against the geopolitical backdrop of the Cold War and digs deeply into the Russian soul.

Fetisov, meanwhile, is the star attraction, as Polsky peels back layers of a man who is in turns stoic, emotional, vulnerable and funny as heck.

Here's a trailer to give you a flavor of the film.

The movie, which is starting to gain buzz as an Oscar hopeful, is scheduled for theatrical release in early 2015.