A modern fairy tale with scientists, partisans, cosmonauts, officials, and the Motherland. The scientist and his assistant are collecting the ingredients for an elixir that can resurrect dead people to life. At the same time, officials are looking for the carpenter who has a power to transmute water into oil.
The workers fight for their rights creating independent union. They know that it is the only way to struggle against the owners of the plant.
This film was shot in 1988. The main action takes place in a rock group's studio during the visit of a few acolytes from Theatre Theatre. It is all served up in connection with Fassbinder «s notion of Antitheatre. The theme of the “mad prince” in actors» improvisations intertwines with the fate of the director and of directing in general. The adventures of the spirit form the true tale of this film. We use only the single interior, the studio room where nothing happens aside from the pulsations of spirit. It comes to life here, and it rests, as if gaining new strength. The Mad Prince Fassbinder is, indeed, spirit. Only a free camera is capable of capturing this freedom.
How to defeat a warrior who has not yet been born, if you have already died? Trendy style, paradoxical language, paranormal phenomena, ancient China, black humor, the Internet, love, kickboxing fights - the real magic of ZENBOXING.
The waste of the toy factory "Ogonyok", clumps of multicolored thermally deformed plastic, turn into a new biological species, then into a new direction of modern art, then into an isolated language of a native tribe discovered by linguists in the jungle, where words must be carried silently with you and shown if necessary, then into heroes of crazy phantasmagoric news.
Boris Yukhananov, along with his friends Tauz, Salah, Nadia and Olya, come to shoot an episode for the video novel "The Crazy Prince" to Nikita, who in turn is in a film expedition near Pskov. Along the way, the tragic history of the Chechen people is interfaced with the biblical book of Esther, a video with a movie, love with death, the sun with night, and happiness with tears.
The basis for the making of this film was a TV show to which many figures of the «youth culture» were invited. Boris Yukhananov turned this into a video project. This plot recurs twice in the film, forming a compositional counterbalance, at the beginning in the guise of a black-and-white television set, and at the end by means of the video action itself. Throughout the entire film we follow a Japanese man who is a kind of medium, a superhero, a bloated ghost of life after death, thus emphasizing the speculative spirit of the huge interest then being paid to «youth culture.» His adventures begin at a lecture podium that is replaced by an autopsy table in a morgue, and they gradually move on to an endless ritual dance with death in its various forms.
