Acting
Made for the Venice Film Festival's 70th anniversary, seventy filmmakers made a short film between 60 and 90 seconds long on their interpretation of the future of cinema.
Dovlatov charts six days in the life of a brilliant, ironic writer who saw far beyond the rigid limits of 70s Soviet Russia. Sergei Dovlatov fought to preserve his own talent and decency with poet and writer Joseph Brodsky, while watching his artist friends got crushed by the iron-willed state machinery.
A saleswoman from the fish store Polina Schukina is going through a difficult life period. By the grace of an extravagant grandmother, she finds herself in the fairy-tale world of princesses, where, as it turns out, everything is subordinated to bureaucracy, and in a lot of echoing corridors and government offices there are queues of girls eager to discover the princess. Pauline has to go through a series of tests that will reveal her personal qualifications in a very competitive profession.
Gosha (nicknamed Kukuruza) comes to the casting to try out for the role of a failed robber. Not the smoothest auditions are mixed with memories of today and the film in which Gosha wants to star. A prostitute, a dead Batman, shooting, a chase, a robbery. Where does reality end and fiction begin? And is there much of a difference between them?
Russia 2017. The world could be on the verge of a great war. People are anxious that things could fall apart. Evolving around an unfinished building, a diverse group of outsiders struggle to find their place in this rapidly changing society, making up the mosaic of existence that is life itself…
The conductor (Anna) suddenly leaves the city and silently lives alone in the northern forest on the seashore. Once a chorus girl (Aglaya) comes to her in the hope of returning Anna to her destiny, but remains with her outside of time and boundaries between reality and sleep. Gradually the voice of the chorus girl becomes the inner voice of the silent conductor.
What is to be a child to whom parents ask the same question every day: whom does he love more? Mom or dad? What should mom do if she madly loves her son, but circumstances force him to take the child away from his father? What should be done to dad if his son is taken to America forever, and he cannot imagine his life without him? This is a story of choice. When deciding for a child, a parent often does as he is comfortable with. The child agrees, afraid to hurt the parent, but time will pass, he will mature and at some point he will decide for himself. Only the parent from this will be much more painful.
