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 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.
Carlos has been just born. He is the sweetest of the babies, but his grandmother is very sorry that he’s was born dark skin. Grandfather Sergey Mikhailovich wants to drink to the health of his grandson and celebrate this event, but grandmother doesn’t allows him to drink. Grandfather wants Carlos to know that he was born in the Great Russian Empire. This is Carlos’s first new year, and I made a movie so that he would remember it, and to talk about hilarious and painful things happening in my new family.
Igor and his friends dream of having a rave in Chernobyl to rethink the space of a man-made disaster through life and art. However, they are faced with a reality where their idea is opposed by unfounded fears, corruption and hypocrisy of officials. The film by the Guatemalan director Pablo Rojas Castillo, a graduate of VGIK and the School of Documentary Film and Theater Marina Razbezhkina and Mikhail Ugarov, is not only about the company of dreamers and the rave at the sarcophagus of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, but also about the need to recycle the Soviet heritage and the clash of values of different generations.
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.”
The documentary follows the life of Farroukh, a young Tajik immigrant who lives in Moscow outskirts with his family and does odd jobs in dreams of becoming an actor.
Confident in her style and way of being, a young trans girl Zhenya moves through the world figuring out life and love. A story about youth, friendship, community and embracing life as it comes.
Russian photographer Maksim Dmitriev liked reality, and in the beginning of the 20 century, he photographed bums, workers, farmers, bankers, and monks. Hundred yours later we showed these photographs to nowadays heroes. And they recognized each other.
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.
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...
Armed with nothing more than a Yamaha keyboard, Valentin commutes back and forth between his shared flat and a metro underpass in search of happiness.
Vova Kayukov suffers from a severe form of cerebral palsy. After the death of his mother from cancer, he lives in a psycho-neurological boarding school near St. Petersburg. His life consists, basically, of watching endless TV shows and TV shows, as well as drawing actors and pop stars. For the first time in several years, he went outside the boarding school, looking at the city through the prism of "cops-bandit" serials.
Mark is 18, and his buddy Kirill is 20. They’ve been friends for just a month but they’re obviously meant for each other. They both crave attention and have a provocative attitude to the world around them. They dance together on the railings of Moscow’s Krymsky Bridge, gatecrash parties, hang out on their skateboards, challenge authority figures and mouth off to everyone who crosses their path. “I’m young, I can do what I want,” Kirill tells us.
A group of (mostly) European (mostly) avant-garde jazz musicians embarks on a musical tour across Russia. The plan is to travel 20,000 km, from Moscow to Vladivostok, on a bus. The project is organized and solely handled by Yury, Russian discipline-loving jazz impresario. The film follows the bus and its passengers as they get deeper and deeper into “Russian reality”, bringing their music to people who had never expected to hear it.
The war in Abkhazia ended more than twenty years ago. But the shadows wandering in the corridors of the republican psychoneurological hospital still remind us of its impact. Sometimes we see ourselves in those shadows and glimpse fragments of reality in their monologues. The monochromatic way they see the world carries many more meanings than we are able to perceive.
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?
Everyone has their own buzz. For him, the high is war. He was in love with the war as a woman, and the feelings did not go away. He can't go back into battle. All he has now is the house of mercy, the monastery on the next street, and the desire to start a different life.
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.
Can one escape from family to get into a mental hospital? An overdose of drugs – and you are “free”. Now Dasha lies on a hospital bed, paints and smokes. She smokes. And smokes. And smokes... A closed space of the mental hospital is more and more hard to endure. How much is she going to stay in this box? A day of discharge comes. She is going to return back home.
