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.
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.
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.
Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.
The Chechen Ruslan Arsajev seizes every opportunity to fight against the Russians, including in Ukraine. A portrait of a displaced mercenary from the front line of the crisis.
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.”
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.
There are those who follow the course of time. As in Soviet times, they adjust the accuracy of the clock in the astronomical institute every day. The clock runs fast, then slow, and we are left to wonder exactly what time we live in.
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?
Six months ago, 46-year-old Julia divorced her husband and now lives alone in a three-room apartment. The children parted. In anticipation of a new love, every evening after work, she goes to sing karaoke. But the past is in no hurry to leave: the fate of jointly acquired property in the marriage remains unresolved. An ex-husband returns to the city.
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.
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.
Faced with the relentless demise of the factory they work at, Mikhail, Andrey, Nina, Vladimir, Nadia and Luda – bosses, foremen, engineers and workers at the giant Moscow automobile plant ZIL – cling to their established routines and professional pride to stay upright in a world which is crumbling around them. When an order comes in to produce three of the factory’s legendary hand-made limousines, once the centerpiece of Soviet military parades on Moscow’s Red Square, Mikhail’s team of hand-picked specialists throws itself at the opportunity to show what they are worth.
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.
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.
Susanna, a sixty-four year old actress, lives with her mother and for a long time hasn’t played in the theatre; only occasionally she appears at small venues with poetic concert programs. But she is haunted by the play, which she rehearsed more than twenty years ago, and which was never staged. She finds a partner; the only thing that remains is to find a theatre that will agree to produce the play.
Twenty-one day is a time period that terminal patients are allowed to stay in hospice. Time is pulsating here according to peculiar inner cycles: getting faster, slower or returning to its ordinary rhythm. We wander through physical and mental spaces: wards, gardens, memories. It is a story of two main protagonists, yet two strangers, for whom the regular talk about death constitutes an integral part of life.
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.
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.
Ivan Komendantov is only 16 years old. But he is already the secretary for ideology of the Stalingrad district committee of the Komsomol of Moscow. Vanya wants to quickly become an adult, so he enthusiastically takes up any business: whether it be the rise of the world economy or a special task to seduce a girl.
