Zakhar Khungureev

On a college trip to remote Northern forests, one of the students - Marina - encounters a burial site of an ancient witch, and is possessed by the spirits of the past. Now Marina and her companions must take part in the millennia old fight between good and evil, involving lake witches, sorcerers, and ancient forces from the myths.

Our eternal theme is crime and punishment. In Boris Godunov, the problems of conscience and existential choice are linked to the history of the country. Pushkin says that these things are woven into a mysterious knot or pattern. The choice of each of us is also the choice of our own history. An incorrect individual choice or a karmic mistake can lead to a chain of fatal events. If a person finds himself in power, it can become a problem for the whole people.

Kheifets - this is the name given in Gitis slang to those who graduated from the workshop of Leonid Efimovich Kheifets. The last of the Mohicans, one of the most significant Russian directors of the late twentieth - early twenty-first centuries, master, teacher. A student of Knebel and Goncharov herself. Arbuzov and Zorin called him "the young man". Ravenskikh and Andrei Popov were friends with him. Oleg Borisov, Sergey Shakurov, Alina Pokrovskaya worked with him. Today we can confidently say that the Heifetz school exists. And how many of today's stars proudly say: I am a student of Leonid Efimovich! Derevianko, Petrov, Pal, Ardova, Tolstoganova. What did he teach them?

In the dead of night, three sorcerers meet on the outskirts of Moscow. They have been forced to work against each other for a long time. The conflict, which involves the best witchcraft forces of the capital, is a banal love triangle. Alexey is an enviable man and earns well, his wife Masha, a complex and insecure young woman, has long lived only in the interests of her family, and her lover Irina will stop at nothing in order to take her place.

A long-time guest of a respectable hotel, an elderly lonely playwright, famous in the past, now left without a job and without funds, is ready to pass away. He signs a contract with a young hotel porter, who, for a large sum within a week, unexpectedly for the customer, has to help him with this.

This is a story about love—the kind we chase, the kind we settle for, and the kind that sneaks up on us when we’re not paying attention. It’s about permanence, or the lack of it, and the terrifying realisation that maybe nothing in life—no feeling, no relationship—ever truly stays the same. Alisa Melikova’s debut film Illusions (2025) is a rich tapestry of emotions, following two couples whose lives have been entwined for 50 years. It poses the question: Is love real, or just a story we tell ourselves? And in the end, does it even matter?