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.
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 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.
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.
Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Thirteen-year-old Alina is going to summer camp. There, she shares a room with five other girls and takes part in the daily activities, which include games on the beach and lots of sports. At first she hangs back, hesitant, but she quickly finds her place in the group. She makes new friends, flirts with boys at the camp, dances in the evenings to loud music and shares secrets with her roommates. But it’s not so easy for everyone to find a place in the social structure of the camp. For Polina, the summer camp isn’t as warm and friendly as she’d hoped. Failing to connect with the other girls and feeling homesick, she withdraws into her own world. Paper Stars is a Russian coming-of-age film that, thanks to its direct camera style, is able to present an intimate, sensitive impression of teenage girls in a new environment where they feel unsure.
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?
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.
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.
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.
