Valentina Kuznetsova
Directing
Known For

Set during the early part of his reign, Ivan faces betrayal from the aristocracy and even his closest friends as he seeks to unite the Russian people. Sergei Eisenstein's final film, this is the first part of a three-part biopic of Tsar Ivan IV of Russia, which was never completed due to the producer's dissatisfaction with Eisenstein's attempts to use forbidden experimental filming techniques and excessive cost overruns. The second part was completed but not released for a decade after Eisenstein's death and a change of heart in the USSR government toward his work; the third part was only in its earliest stage of filming when shooting was stopped altogether.
Ivan the Terrible, Part I

When German knights invade Russia, Prince Alexander Nevsky must rally his people to resist the formidable force. After the Teutonic soldiers take over an eastern Russian city, Alexander stages his stand at Novgorod, where a major battle is fought on the ice of frozen Lake Chudskoe. While Alexander leads his outnumbered troops, two of their number, Vasili and Gavrilo, begin a contest of bravery to win the hand of a local maiden.
Alexander Nevsky

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.
Hamlet

Soviet and American soldiers are meeting on the shores of the Elbe river in Germany in 1945.
Meeting on the Elbe

The film is based on the play by K. Simonov. It is the story of an American journalist who spends time in Russia and sees socialism in action. Upon his return to the U.S., a prestigious editor asks him to write a book about his experience. He receives a handsome advance for the project and he and his fiancée are able to buy a house, a car, and other symbols of the American dream. But the editor’s generosity comes with a caveat: the book must present a negative picture of Soviet society. Will he simply keep the money and do what is expected of him, or will he instead tell the truth?
The Russian Question

The film tells about a band of demobilized Red Army men and two civilians who cross a Middle Asian desert. They are forced to do battle with superior forces of Basmachi rebels for the dry draw-well.
The Thirteen

Based on a famous fairytale by Yuri Olesha. A fairy tale film about the clever tightrope walker Tibule, who fights alongside the armorer Prospero and all the working people against the tyrants, the three Fat Men, who rule the state until the young heir Tutti comes of age. The freedom fighters are aided by the kind Dr. Gaspar and the brave acrobat girl Suok, who has to pretend to be a doll to sneak into the palace and free Prospero.
Three Fat Men

High school student Andrei Goryayev faces a criminal liability for a hooligan misconduct. A compassionate witness pities the young man, and he is released. Having quarreled with his father, Goryayev leaves home and wanders around the capital until he accidentally finds himself in a new district of Moscow: at a construction site in Cheryomushki.
Son

King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.
King Lear

In 1922, in a small town, the boys formed a pioneer squad and named it "Red Bees."
Red Bees

The plot structure of the film is based on a commonplace situation from the practice of foreign trade organizations - the conclusion of a trade agreement with a foreign company.
...And Other Officials

In a training flight, the Il-28 plane crashes. Shooter-radio operator Sorokin without an order leaves the plane, lands first and writes a denunciation to the pilot Yegorov. Yegorov has to leave military service, his beloved girlfriend Nadya is leaving him. Sixteen years have passed since then. Nadya is married to the slanderer Sorokin and brings up a son with him who doesn't know who his real father is. One day, the whole family ends up on an airplane controlled by Yegorov. Clarification of relations leads to a belated triumph of truth, which affects all heroes: one destroys, the other exalts, in the third instills hope...
Not Under the Jurisdiction

Semyon Danilovich Petukhov was very surprised to found upon returning from vacation that he was declared dead and... buried.
A Groom from the Right Society

The young composer Mikhail Glinka performs his new work at a soiree at earl Vielgorsky's house. However, the public is accustomed to Western music, and reacts coldly to the creation of the composer. This makes him very sad, but soon he decides to go learn the art of music in Italy. After returning from Italy, he is full of desire to write national Russian opera. Vasily Zhukovsky proposes a subject: a feat of Ivan Susanin. Tsar Nicholas I change the name of the opera to A Life for the Tsar and assigns a librettist - Baron Rosen. Acquaintance with the future co-author shocked Glinka: Rosen speaks Russian with a noticeable German accent. The premiere was successful, but Glinka was still not entirely happy with the libretto: "False words were written by Rosen". When Nicholas I learned that Ruslan and Lyudmila was written on Pushkin's subject, he sees it as sedition. The bitter experience of the composer brighten his supporters.
Man of Music

The day came when the heroine realized that her children had grown up and it was now time to think about herself. During the war, when she was just fifteen, Inna Kovaleva went to work at a factory, and she tied her entire life to it. So, when she was offered the position of a section supervisor, Inna agreed without hesitation...
The Night Is Young

A film adaptation of the short story of the same name by Guy de Maupassant. The action takes place in the XIX century. Franco-Prussian War of 1870. A group of French bourgeois leaves in a stagecoach from Rouen occupied by Prussian troops. Along with them comes one attractive demimonde lady. The only way to get out is to persuade her, nicknamed "Ball-of-Fat" a la "Boule-de-Suif" to satisfy the lust of the head of the gendarmerie...
Boule de Suif

About the great Czech satirist Jaroslav Hašek, who was captured by the Russians during the First World War. Not wanting to fight for the interests of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, Hašek enters the Red Army and, as a commissar of the international brigade, goes the military way from Samara to Irkutsk.
A Great Road Ahead

Lovely telegraph operator Masha Stepanova is a sanitary nurse. During a training alarm, she meets a taxi driver Alexei (Alyosha) Solovyov. He reads verses to a girl and invites her to the theater. But at the appointed time, Alyosha doesn't come, and Mashenka finds him, helps to recover. Young people fell in love with each other, but Alexei was too frivolous, and brings the girl a lot of sorrows and insults. Because of Alexei’s hobby for another girl, Masha breaks up with him. But she will be able to convey her faithful and true-hearted feeling through years of separation and the hardships of wartime, and when they meet again at the front of the Finnish War, Solovyov realizes what a gift of fate was meeting him with this girl.
Mashenka

Peter married and was immediately appointed captain of the ship. In his first flight, the hero went with his wife — really wanted to introduce her to her mother. But mother offended on him…
Door Without Lock

January 1917. The workers and peasants of Russia, hunted by the tsarist government in the trenches, forced to defend alien interests of the king, the landowners and exploiters-capitalists. Bolshevik worker Yakov Orel, selflessly performing party mission, said the soldiers the truth about war, about revolution, about what the overthrow of the autocracy does not mean the liberation of the workers from the yoke of landlords and capitalists exploitation. For example, one regiment of the film reflects the events that took place in the whole of the Russian army between February and October 1917.