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We're used to spy films in which the communists are the bad guys – but the eastern bloc had its own secret agent screen heroes, too

A secret agent is attending a party in an elegant apartment. Beautiful young people wear the latest fashions, sip martinis and canoodle in corners. The spy slips into a back room and starts breaking into a safe. It looks like a scene from a James Bond movie – except this is communist Hungary, and the heroes are what western policy makers in the cold war would have called "them", rather than "us". The film is Fotó Háber, an ultra-stylish spy drama made in Budapest in 1963, and, like many of the films emerging from behind what was the iron curtain, it blows apart the glum, grey image of the eastern bloc from the inside.

That we have the chance to see Fotó Háber is thanks to a...

If you were a filmmaker and your name was "Ion," it's just possible you would have a predisposition to make science fiction films. And if your full name was "Ion Popescu-Gopo," maybe you'd make comedy science fiction films.

There was a filmmaker called Ion Popescu-Gopo, but he was Romanian, and so his name probably doesn't imply any such predisposition, but he did make at least one comedy science fiction film, the wordless S-a Furat O Bomba, or A Bomb Was Stolen, in 1961. So there.

A graphic artist turned animator turned feature director (this was his debut), Popescu-Gopo displays his training at every opportunity, especially in the film's stunning opening sequence, set amid a featureless plain of infinite expanse (but actually a hillside, I guess, enabling characters and vehicles to abruptly appear over the horizon instead of gradually expanding out of it). Our hero, a young chap in a suit, is...