Ten director graduates from Marina Razbezhkina’s School of Documentary Film and Documentary Theatre lived with a camera for two months in order to chronicle the last “Russian winter” and its popular uprising against Vladimir Putin’s presidential run. People, faces, conversations, protests, failures and triumphs come together to chronicle the campaign.
The film features the life of mother and daughter who live in the woods near the outskirts of little city in Kazakhstan. The life on the edge of civilization, making money by selling scrap metal. Other people’s everyday life exists somewhere far away.
Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.
The last few years, Matthew and Kate live in the village. An event occurs in their lives that leads to a radical redefinition of relationships. The past and the present are intertwined into one confused story in which the characters lose sleep, drive each other out of the house, rush into the arms, starting a new circle. And precisely at this time friends from Berlin come to visit them.
SPARTA is the Agricultural Poetized Association for the Development of Labor Activity. This is how the commune calls itself, which has been engaged in the development of the "Theory of Happiness" in the Ukrainian village "Karavan" for more than 20 years. Unable to reconcile with the collapse of communist utopia, the "Spartans" created their own.
Two people are on the road. Everyday life, business calls, games, a curve of the highway, a swing and again business calls... During this year the father and the daughter have not seen much of each other and they have not been alone for a long time. Two cameras are looking face to face; different fears inhabit one and the same space. There is a question: should they come back or should they continue traveling together?
Two different worlds. On the one hand - porters, who bear pianos. On the other hand - people, who the porters visit – musicians, new Russian “middle class”. What is the dialog between them? How does it clear for each of them - what is the musical instrument for?
The Samodurov family lives in the village of Ugljanets, Voronezh Region. Shura and her brothers Alyosha and Petya are blind from birth. After the death of her parents and her older brother, Shura refused to take the sick brothers to a psychiatric clinic. The last 10 years they live together three.
A provincial Russian family killed off by suicide, murder and manslaughter and a boy who asks about guilt and forgiveness in the midst of all this squalor. Shockingly great.
Sasha and Marina are raising their three adorable children in a wooden izba in a village in Voronezh region of Russia. They have no indoor plumbing and subsist mostly on a diet of cheap processed food and bread-and-mayo sandwiches. Sasha works in the IT industry, but a person of his talents cannot find steady work in the countryside and is forced to eke out a living as a computer repairman for his colorful neighbors. Sasha drives from client to client in his 1972 Lada, making barely enough money to cover his gas expenses, while Marina is busy running their impoverished, even by village standards, household. The Kiselyovs have happiness in spades - the heart of their family is their youngest child, the precocious and charming Katya. What kind of a future awaits this little girl?
In the circus tent „Joy” the same thing happens every day – they dismantle and assemble the tent with a dome full of stars, give performances, and move on to the next place. Lynx and parrot trainers quarrel over every little thing, and Valera the clown always performs alone. Until one day a new partner joins him, the clown Yana, and he starts to dream about conquering the world of the circus together with her.
In Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan a city of the future is being built. Named Innopolis, it was officially opened in 2015 and is the first new town to be built in Russia since the collapse of the USSR. The best IT specialists travel there from all over the country to create a new community. But those who work in the town’s service industry are ordinary inhabitants of the neighbouring villages: Pustiye Morkvashi and Vostochnaya Zvezda. What is this juxtaposition like: the new world and the old world? Perhaps, despite the apparent differences, these worlds are identical in their essence?
Nikita Yefimov brings his camera into a Russian high-security detention centre. The head of the penitentiary department offers to personally enact moments from prison life to control its image.
Viktor Ryzhakov takes charge of the Sovremennik theatre after the death of Galina Volchek, who led the troupe for almost half a century and enjoyed absolute authority. For the theatre’s first new production, the new artistic director chooses a play about a family whose members have ceased to understand each other. While working on the play, the director and actors become more and more like the characters in the future production, and find it increasingly difficult to find mutual understanding within their “theatrical family.”
Last road in the ambulance. The driver - a cheerful Armenian - comes to those who can no longer be helped and becomes for them a guide between life and death. The road, meanwhile, shines with bright lights, erodes in an abstract pattern, yells with sirens. There is an inexorable countdown.
The demonstrators on the streets of Moscow in July 2019 want just one thing: fair elections. Despite their peaceful protest, 2,700 activists are arrested and hundreds are injured. The active camera places the viewer at the heart of the demonstrations, among the pushing and shoving of the chanting crowds. “You should be protecting us!” shouts a young woman at a soldier, and two big men come and take her away.
Тrue Kazakh girls don’t marry Russians. This is what grandma Zeinegul believes in. But her beloved granddaughter disobeyed her will. Many years later the girl comes back to Kazakhstan. Her mother drinks, her grandma prays, her father got married again, but she wants to take a picture of her whole family, just like the one they took years ago when she was a child. The picture of the family she loves and hates so much.
In a small village on the slopes of the former coal mines, Oleg Pavlov, the father of many children, screens the "Little Prince" of Exupery. The camera is the cheapest, bought for retirement. In the roles - Oleg and his four children. Two years of filming and editing - and journalists from all over Russia are on a visit to an amazing creative and friendly family. But the family never calls his father at the table. Children refuse to go to the premiere of the film. And Oleg himself does not go to spend the eldest daughter, when she leaves to live in another city. He just sleeps. And no one wakes him up.
Varya is sixteen. Varya doesn't go to school. Varya asks that she be called Sasha. Varya has a goal - to go to St. Petersburg. She plays the violin in the train, earning a trip. But the trip of a dream turns out to be a dangerous adventure, in which everything goes not according to plan...
The lead character of the movie is modern day heroine, a girl aged 18 not yet ready to carry a burden of responsibility. She is no different from a thousand other girls either in terms of code of behavior, or style of speech, or desire to be loved. Except for one thing: in reality she is a boy.
