Maxim Panfilov

The story of the last year and a half of Tsar Nicholas II and his family from the February Revolution of 1917 to their execution in July 1918.

The story is set in a relatively comfortable Stalin-era prison in the town of Marfino where a community of prisoners with highly technical skills do research for the state. Based on the novel by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

100 Minutes is the tale of thousands of Soviet soldiers who fought the Nazis and whose only ‘crime’ was to get caught. Stalin’s justice meted out on the prisoners who returned home was swift: ten years of forced labour in the Siberian camps. Why then would prisoners like Ivan Denisovich fight to stay alive to face another day of hell?

Diplomat Volodin is going to work in the States for a responsible job. But, having crossed the ocean, he immediately went over to the Americans. And not empty-handed: he calls the American embassy from a pay phone and gives the appearance of a Soviet intelligence officer. The traitor is sure that he will not be identified “by the phone's strangled voice. There can be no such technology. But, on the instructions of the Chekists, such a technique was developed in Marfino's "sharashka" near Moscow by convict engineers and scientists.

In a small provincial town, a famous actress comes on tour, who once fled from here from the shame of unhappy love. Many years ago, she was forced to leave her illegitimate son to raise strangers. Therefore, when a talented and reckless young actor appears on the way of a now rich and famous woman, she certainly wants to help him. The actress begins to take an active part in the fate of the young man.

A Russian mother flees to Uzbekistan in WWII where she and her children are taken in by a local family.