Pavel Labazov

Russia, early 90s. A fictional story inspired by financier Sergey Mavrodi, his securities company "MMM", and the pyramid scheme he ran that left upwards of fifteen million investors with nothing when it crashed.

The film is about the complicated and even paradoxical relationships in the world of academic music. The character of Aleksandr Maslaev represents the Maestro, a kind of modern Mozart, wallowing in corruption, plagiarism, and envy. Once a talented composer, he's totally lost his gift and cynically buys new music from young composers, then plays it under his own name. Yet, the Maestro does not close this chain, for everyone pays his debts...

A remake of the Grigoriy Aleksandrov's "Volga-Volga", a postmodernist deconstruction of the legendary Soviet movie. Vladislav Mamyshev-Monroe's head was "glued" to Lyubov Orlova's body, and now Monroe is re-acting the movie, making what was a musical about amateur artists into a tragedy – postwoman wants too much and, eventually, loses her mind. Sometime in the movie, the movie shifts to Antarctica from the Volga, where Monroe-Orlova is looking at the fascinating life of penguins.

In the small town of Kansk, the Krasnoyarsk Territory many years in a row there is an international festival of short experimental films, which has a strong reputation throughout the world. "Russia as a dream" is an international project, shot by a team of authors and united directors, artists, poets. Each of the guests of the 14th International Kan Video Festival held in 2015 was invited to participate in the creation of a general film, the theme of which was the relationship of man and landscape, civilization and nature, reality and sleep.

In the late 1980s, a now infamous squat appeared on Moscow’s Furmanny Lane, which quickly became a gathering point for the most promising young artists of the time (Mukhomory, Vadim Zakharov, Yury Albert, and Andrey Filippov, among others) and just daring, high-spirited individuals. The inhabitants of “Furmanny” recall life in Moscow’s first squat and the opportunities created by this unique site.