Lenfilm

A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality.

Peasant children Mytyl and Tyltyl are led on a magical quest for the fabulous Blue Bird of Happiness by the fairy Berylune. On their journey, they're accompanied by the anthropomorphized presences of a Dog, a Cat, Light, Fire, and Bread, among other entities.

People living at a seashore town are frightened by reports of an unknown creature called "the sea devil". Nobody knows what it is, but it's really the son of doctor Salvator. The doctor performed surgery on his son and now young Ichtiander can live under water. This gives him certain advantages, but also creates a lot of problems.

The film tells a story about the extraordinary journey of the modest little girl Gerda. She is looking for her friend Kai, who was kidnapped and taken to her kingdom by the powerful evil Snow Queen. In search of her beloved friend, Gerda ends up in the castle to the cunning, insidious and at the same time funny king, meets forest robbers. On the way, the girl will have many obstacles before the decisive battle with the Snow Queen. But Gerda’s faithful heart will overcome all adversity...

A Soviet cruise ship "Evgeni Onegin" is carrying cages with tigers and lions for a Soviet Circus. One loose monkey unlocks all cages, letting the tigers and lions out. Poor passengers and crew have no place to run. The captain abandons his post out of fear, and the monkey takes over the captain's post. The ship gets under total control by the tigers and lions. Only one lady is standing up to the challenge. Her name is Marianna, she loves animals, and she takes the situation under control.

In a world after the nuclear apocalypse a scholar helps a small group of children and adults survive, staying with them in the basement of the former museum of history. In his mind he writes letters to his son — though it is obvious that they will never be read.

Police captain Aleshin is investigating a case related to the theft of opium at a chemical factory warehouse. Everything suggests that the offender must be sought among the employees of the enterprise. One of the workers, Frolov, is familiar to Alyoshin in another matter. And although Aleshin is confident in Frolov’s honesty, he suspects something was wrong, seeing how he hides something from him and himself suffers from it. At the dacha, the factory director Vasiltsev killed his stepfather, who turned out to be an unnecessary witness. A trace brings Aleshin to a plant employee, a certain Olga ...

"Heart of a Dog" is a Soviet film adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s iconic novella. Set in 1920s Moscow, it tells the satirical and darkly humorous story of a stray dog named Sharik, who is transformed into a human by Professor Preobrazhensky through a daring medical experiment. The resulting man, Poligraf Poligrafovich Sharikov, embodies the social and ideological tensions of early Soviet society. With its sharp critique of class struggle, human nature, and the perils of radical change, the film is celebrated for its faithful adaptation, brilliant performances, and rich allegorical depth.

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

Having lived for his pleasure most of his life, floor polisher Ivan Karetnikov, on the threshold of his 60th birthday, did not for the first time leave his next wife himself, but she abandoned him, moreover, in public. In addition to these troubles, he was fired from his job, replaced by a mechanical polisher. In this difficult moment, Karetnikov remembered the first wife, and then the second and third. But turning to each of them, he seems to begin to lose hope of seeing compassion for himself.

An entertaining show featuring various artists. A wise parrot teaches Maxim Leonidov - the leader of 'Secret', a very popular group at the time - how to become a star.

King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.

The setting is the east shore of the Caspian Sea (today's Turkmenistan) where the Red Army soldier Fyodor Sukhov has been fighting the Civil War in Russian Asia for a number of years. After being hospitalised and then demobbed, he sets off home to join his wife, only to be caught up in a desert fight between a Red Army cavalry unit and Basmachi guerrillas. The cavalry unit commander, Rahimov, "convinces" Sukhov to help, temporarily, with the protection of abandoned women of the Basmachi guerrilla leader Abdullah's harem. Leaving a young Red Army soldier, Petrukha, to assist Sukhov with the task, Rahimov and his cavalry unit set out to pursue fleeing Abdullah.Sukhov and women from Abdullah's harem return to a nearby shore town. Soon, looking for a seaway across the border, Abdullah and his gang come to the same town...

Russian provincial town in the middle of the 1930s Stalin's Great Purge. Ivan Lapshin, the head of the local police, does what he has to do. And he does it well.

Man is trying to find simple human happiness. He decides for himself the question of what this happiness consists of - wealth, high social status, or something else.

A group of high school students, after all the lies on April 1st, decide to do a Day of Truth on April 3rd.

Vasily Kutuzov, the namesake of the famous commander, ends up in a mental hospital because of his talent for making up jokes. Everyone in his family had this gift, and many suffered because of it. The authorities didn't like that the Kutuzovs were bothering people. Vasily's neighbors in the ward are all famous people who left a mark in history. So he amuses them until the doctors decide to cure him of this "disease"...

In December 1825, distinguished members of the Russian military, most of whom were quite affluent and of noble lineage, took it upon themselves to stir revolution against the autocratic and tyrannical Czar Nikolai I in the wake of his not honoring the drafting of a constitution for the Russian people. The revolution failed miserably and the conspirators (known as the Decembrists) were weeded out by the czar himself. One by one, each of the conspirators confess and are systematically exiled to the harsh winters of Siberia, slated to work and wither in a prison/mine. The wives of the conspirators are faced with the prospect of leaving the bosom of wealth and family (including their own children) to be with their husbands in the brutal Siberian locale. If they agree to this, they face having their illustrious social stations stripped away and certain disdain from everyone around them...

An almanac of short feature films based on stories by Mikhail Mishin from the collection of short stories "Pause in a Major".