M. Razbezhkina and M. Ugarov Academy

Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.

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 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.

Summer 2010. The entire central part of Russia is engulfed in fires. The authors of the films of the almanac together with the volunteers go to the epicenter of events. Volunteers, foresters, firefighters – they are not heroes in the usual sense of the word, it was just their life, their trouble, and they tried to cope with it as best they could.

Two twin brothers. Bright and charismatic. One paints temples, the other writes musicals. And for three years they have not communicated and live in different cities. What has separated them? Different views on life and creativity or love for the same girl?

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 convicts of the female penal-colony Marina, Olya and Albina are waiting to be released. To pass the time they decide to make puppets, sew them and stage a small performance.

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.

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.

A former neo-Buddhist who has become an ardent defender of Orthodox values, Dmitry Enteo riveted public attention after performing several eccentric actions on himself. He calls himself an orthodox ‘actionist’ and gathered a movement of Orthodox activists around himself called ’God’s Will’.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

The main character is 96. She is imprisoned in the flat, not sure what day it is and hardly remembers who of her relatives is still alive. Is it life? But everything is filled with meaning: life outside her window, worrying for her close ones and love toward those around her. That becomes more important than details of everyday reality.

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.

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.

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.