Production
At the center of the story is an amateur female choir of the city of Tikhvin. Each of her participants is an ordinary woman who in everyday life is completely unrelated to the scene. One of them is a seller in a store, someone is engaged in garbage collection, and someone does work as a loader to provide shelter and food. But all of them are united by a love of music and a hope for a brighter future. The arrival of the Italian delegation in the city becomes a real glimpse among the gray everyday life of our heroines, and their dreams at that moment seem even more illusory.
A brilliant observational documentary filmed at the Civil Registry office in St. Petersburg, where people come to have births, marriages, divorces and deaths registered. 'It’s like a theatre here', one says in the beginning of the film, and it indeed is, the Theater of Life. The young women working in the office have a job that shifts from being verbally attacked and called idiots, to situations where they are subject to flirt, or where they master the happy ceremony of marriage. Faces, joy, sorrow, fun, despair... It’s all very well composed, rhythmical, with atmosphere conveyed, and lives up to what a documentary should be: multilayered and universal. And about Life.
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In a Komi village, we listen to inner sounds and see figures of Komi people. As we approach the edge of this enchanted world, we do not want to trespass it with our logical explanations.
A shell-shocked Afghanistan war hero named Ivan Skryabin (Mikhail Skryabin) spends his days stoking the fire in a giant coal furnace. When he isn’t tending the flames, he keeps busy with other activities. He works on a historical novel. His adult daughter Sasha (Aida Tumutova) comes to visit. Local kids come to gaze at the flames. Gangsters, including a former Army sergeant (Aleksandr Mosin) and a sniper known as Bison (Yuri Matveyev), drop by to add special kindling to the fire.
The first attempt in the history of Russian documentalism to understand what was the historical moment in which Anatoly Sobchak appeared in the political arena what his role in the history of the country was and, finally, why he suffered as a politician collapse. Perhaps his ideas were too advanced for his time?
Former criminal Sergei meets Vera - an elderly unhappy woman who lives in a dormitory. After Sergei commits another crime, they run together and along the way they accidentally get into a zone contaminated by radiation. Sergei decides to stay there, but Vera does not leave him. At that moment three looters come to the territory.
Alex is a fashionable showbiz character. One day he comes across an article about a big win in a casino in colonial Cambodia in a French magazine with a vintage photograph. In the photo, Hero recognizes his grandfather, who everyone thought was dead. He asks his former lover, the French cultural attaché, to find out. It turns out that he has an inheritance waiting for him in Paris for many years. The guardian of the inheritance turns out to be a high-ranking Freemason who tells him the story of his grandfather, gives him the winnings and involves him in a Masonic conspiracy.
This movie is about a day in life of the settlement for people with mental problems. Located in a peaceful countryside, it conveys an image of a pure, happy place, where people live and work together, in complete harmony. But there is a growing unexplainable feeling of anxiety and hopelessness.
An elderly patient claims to have had a dream about death. The doctor does everything possible to ease his death, and suddenly the phone rings - his wife reports from the stock exchange that the shares in which all the money was invested have fallen sharply, and they urgently need to be sold. Gradually, a strange metamorphosis occurs with the doctor... And now it is no longer clear for whom death came in the dream...
Masculine and feminine, hard and soft, continuous and interrupted, whole and fragmented. All that is encompassed by just one day at the factory.
There was a split between men and women in the village. Led by the village teachers, the women turned to religion. And then the Finns came... the film is a cross-section of village life in all its diversity. School, students, Aborigines and missionaries, teacher… Their idea of religion and of themselves is a kind of everyday lessons of modern life.
The thirst for a miracle lives in every person. The hero of the film, Fedor, witnesses an accident, as a result of which people close to him die. He decides that he was not saved by chance and now must change his life. Fedor is trying to live the way Orthodox hermits lived, tormenting himself with prayers and fasts. In this new world, he finds a guide - Father Hilarion. The hermit finally has hope that he will soon become an eyewitness of Revelation. But Father Hilarion is being killed absurdly and senselessly. Having experienced deep despair, Fedor will return to the people, experience love and jealousy, hatred and fear. And only when he reaches the edge - having decided to kill - will he become a witness of a miracle...
Poetic portrait of a filmmaker. The famous director reflects on creativity and love. His friends and associates take part in the film: artist Vladimir Shinkarev, engineer Vladimir Nikolaev, actress Elena Kramer (Spiridonova), director, film critic Oleg Kovalov, necrorealist directors Yevgeny Yufit, Igor Bezrukov.
A documentary on women in St. Petersburg who enroll in a program which will help them land millionaire husbands.
This is a poetic film set in the times of Lenin's NEP. A ballet dancer steals a brooch and gives it as a present to another dancer. This is a crime of passion. A mysterious black ball is after the heroine. She runs away from it and manages to give the brooch in an exquisite pirouette movement, as shiny as diamond facets. What gives a stone its dazzling luster are its polished facets. But the real gem is love, and it's much harder to get than any diamond in the world.
This movie is a collection of portraits of residents of Russian countryside. Not a single word. Only long look into the camera. Landscape. Flow of time.
Fyodor Uglov, the oldest practicing surgeon (from 1930 to 2004), who worked in all areas of surgery and performed many fundamentally new operations first in the world, delivers a monologue from the 100-year milestone of his own life.
