Production
A young Finnish woman escapes an enigmatic love affair in Moscow by boarding a train to the arctic port of Murmansk. Forced to share the long ride and a tiny sleeping car with a larger than life Russian miner, the unexpected encounter leads the occupants of Compartment No. 6 to face major truths about human connection.
In a multicultural suburb of Helsinki, a bullied Russian immigrant decides to fight back, a young woman dreams of superstardom at any cost, and a junkie couple schemes their way out of debt.
Tanya, a young educator, accompanies twelve teenagers to a theatre festival in Sochi under the supervision of Maria Genrikhovna, an experienced head teacher. Initially, there's little sympathy between the two teachers. However, they discover a deeper bond in much more fundamental things: aversion to marching in formation and other forms of officialism. Their ability to find joy even in challenging situations unites them.
Olga, Katya, and Andrey have known each other since childhood. They moved to Moscow many years ago and have become successful. Olga is an actress, Katya works for a large-scale PR agency, and Andrey is a political analyst. They buy cars, take mortgages, build country houses. Just like everybody else. But their lives bring them neither happiness nor content. The feeling of "something's not right but I can't put my finger on it" underpins the lives of today's thirty-year-olds. Their childhood took place during the Soviet era, when kids dreamed of becoming heroes, believed in spy stories and a bright future. Yet nobody expected that the dream of becoming a hero would be replaced by the dream of stable and predictable existence. People have stopped dreaming of truly grand things. They just play their roles.
Oleg is a young gifted paramedic. His wife Katya works as a nurse at the hospital emergency department. She loves Oleg, but is fed up with him caring more about patients than her. She tells him she wants a divorce. The new head of Oleg’s EMA department is a cold-hearted manager who’s got new strict rules to implement. Oleg couldn’t care less about the rules – he’s got lives to save; his attitude gets him in trouble with the new boss. The crisis at work coincides with the personal life crisis. Caught up between their patients, alcohol-fueled off-shifts, and an evolving health care system, Oleg and Katya have to find the binding force that will keep them together.
Teenage boy Misha attends hypnosis sessions with psychotherapist Volkov to recover from sleepwalking. As a result, Misha falls under the influence of a hypnologist to such an extent that he ceases to understand where reality is and where illusion is. After the mysterious death of one of Volkov’s patients, Misha decides to conduct an investigation to get to the bottom of the truth. But what if the dream and reality merged into one, and in the end he becomes the main suspect?
14th year old girl Meera is craving for secure love and support. On New Year's Eve she is trying to get rid of constant nightmare biggest secret looming over her young life. Meera is going to party with friends but a normal teenager life is not for her because of long surpressed home sexual abuse.
Anya, a young academic raised in an orphanage, is on the cusp of success when she’s accused of drug possession. While in limbo hiding from the police, she hits the road with Kristina, another orphan several years Anya’s junior, in search of her possibly mythical grandmother.
Petersburg. A Selfie comprises seven novellas about the beautiful city of St. Petersburg, Russia, shot by female directors. The film tells a story of a real, living and breathing city, rather than a mythical phantasm. Each novella tells its own story about love and loneliness, luck and hope.
Egor is a vet at a training facility for hunting dogs in a remote region of the country. Surrounded by foxes, deer, badgers, and dogs, he lives in a small building next to the house of the facility's master. He treats the dogs, cleans the kennels, oversees the workers, and meets with clients and their dogs. It's easier for him to get along with dogs than with people. Egor is willing to take on any job to get closer to the facility's master and his near and dear. He wants the impossible - to become a member of that family.
Matthias Bleuel, a logistician of a german mail order company is send to Kemorovo in Siberia to teach some russian subsidiary company the german work flow system. But soon this land changes him and everything for him.
Kira is 36. She works at the Pulkovo Airport call centre and lives with her younger sister Vera and her daughters. A couple years ago, their mother kicked the sisters out of the house and later disappeared. It's time for Kira to accept that her mother is dead and move on: get the death certificate, claim her inheritance and start living separately from her sister and nieces. A new life awaits her. But Kira does not want to change anything and dreams only of her mother coming back.
The Kazakh village Karatas has long been subjugated by a criminal boss called Poshaev. He provides housing and jobs for the locals but will ruthlessly execute anyone who dares to oppose him. This is the lesson the pauper Arzu is about to learn first-hand—his wife Karina has informed the police about the crimes that are taking place there. Arzu is a cripple; now he must raise his little daughter alone. He is so helpless and grief-stricken that he doesn’t even seem to be contemplating revenge. Poshaev takes him under his wing and offers him the position of a guard at a building site. Soon Arzu has a chance to prove his loyalty, and he becomes Poshaev’s right hand. But where do Arzu’s real loyalties lie—with his boss or with the idea of justice?
When two spoiled hipsters embark on the rusty trawler for a summer internship, they get much more than what they bargained for. This shabby boat is the floating home of a dozen weary and irritable sailors, whose only priority is making money and not getting killed in the process. Ice-cold waves, incredibly beautiful but severe seascapes, hard labour and tons of stinking fish is the daily menu. The sea is unpredictable, and the upcoming storm is not the main test that awaits the ship’s crew. Their trip to sea, however, turns out to be more serious and more tragic than either of them could have imagined.
A 15-year old Vika has to grow up. Only yesterday she was just a teenager and now she’s a mom. Catching sidelong scowls of adults, being mocked by peers, unbearable responsibility – it seems like the entire world is against her and Vika is all by herself. More truly, she has a child now, she’s not all alone.
Masked figures with machine guns march into the secondary school in Karatas, take the pupils hostage, and execute one of them. They make no demands. Silent terror is their modus operandi. Seeing as the army will take two days to arrive due to a snowstorm, maths teacher Tazshi decides to assemble his own assault team: his ex-wife, the gym teacher, the cowardly school principal, an alcoholic night watchman, the village idiot, and an incompetent chief of police.
Vanya is a salesperson in the Hunter and Fisher shop. Kristina is a ballerina at the Perm Opera and Ballet Theatre. Kristina jokingly calls Vanya a "retro person" for her love of everything old. She herself is a modern person, nostalgia for the romantic past is not characteristic of her. And yet, these two dissimilar people have something in common - the fear of loneliness and the obsession with starting a family.
The film’s heroine is the gynaecologist Masha, whose husband leaves her. When a man leaves his wife, he carries away all her hopes for a future. Of course, it would be noble to let the husband go, but Masha is a strong woman and begins a desperate struggle for her infidel husband Misha. The power is unequal. Masha is already well in her thirties, while the fitness-trainer Oksana is just over twenty. But behind Masha stand a great experience of life and two small children. In this situation she is ready to use the entire arsenal available, including extraterrestrial forces. The young Oksana relies only on feelings. And on her fine figure, her magnificent hair and irrepressible temperament. Who will win this fight and get the prize? And what happens when the dream of one of them will become true?
In cities like Paris there are countless people from Eastern Europe who have forsaken their homelands because they can see no future there. Lucia and her little daughter Marussia are two such people. They have been thrown out by the Russian acquaintances they were staying with and must tramp the streets with their trolley suitcases searching for somewhere else to live. A Russian Orthodox priest offers them their first night's shelter. They spend the second night in a homeless hostel and party through the third with a chance acquaintance. On the fourth night they sleep clandestinely in a cinema and on the fifth with a Russian artist in a hotel … Lucia is good-looking, dresses elegantly and is certainly not shy of men. This serves the mother and her daughter well. In spite of all the uncertainties in their lives, the two frequently share tender moments.
30-year-old Muscovite Aiko’s father, with whom she had not communicated for many years, died - he was a tyrant, and she does not feel sorry for him. But for some reason she goes to Kazakhstan for the funeral, where she sees her father’s second family for the first time: the sister is unbearable, the brother is out of this world, the stepmother is the same age as Aiko herself. And the strangest thing is that for them dad was completely different.
