Varya is sixteen. Varya doesn't go to school. Varya asks that she be called Sasha. Varya has a goal - to go to St. Petersburg. She plays the violin in the train, earning a trip. But the trip of a dream turns out to be a dangerous adventure, in which everything goes not according to plan...
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.
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.
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.
In Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan a city of the future is being built. Named Innopolis, it was officially opened in 2015 and is the first new town to be built in Russia since the collapse of the USSR. The best IT specialists travel there from all over the country to create a new community. But those who work in the town’s service industry are ordinary inhabitants of the neighbouring villages: Pustiye Morkvashi and Vostochnaya Zvezda. What is this juxtaposition like: the new world and the old world? Perhaps, despite the apparent differences, these worlds are identical in their essence?
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.”
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.
A Russian girl, a Kurdish father. The father lives in Syria, in a town near the Turkish border. The girl joins him to meet her new family and... to find her lost roots. Everything moves forward in fragments, of time and of space. It is not only an aesthetic choice. It is a form consistent with the state of war, with the fragility of existences, with the capturing of reality by the body and by the spirit. But everything moves forward, in its way, carried along by a painful energy that obstinately perforates the borders.
Every evening a group of grandmothers-druzhinnits appears on the outskirts of Kaluga. Almost all of them over eighty. Armed with red armbands and a formidable word, they come out to clean up their neighborhood. To local drunkards to drink in a court yard became much more difficult.
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.
Sabina dreamed of an ideal place to live away from civilization. To find him, she leaves the parental home and goes with her husband Sergei and one-year-old Yaseya to Altai. The road turns into a nightmare of daily quarrels: Sabina does not want to help with the child, clean up and cook, and Sergei gets tired of endless scandals. Against the background of growing irritation with each other, Sabina's dreams are increasingly detached from reality. And yet, the journey continues.
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?
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.
Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.
In the event of natural disaster, turn off electricity and gas, hide your valuable objects, lock the house, climb onto the roof, and maybe you will survive. Natasha, 12 years old, knows these instructions by heart. So, while waiting for the storm, she laughs and fights, suffers heartbreak, attempts to negotiate the purchase of a new swimsuit with her father. With zest and delicacy, with clear complicity with the body of her young heroine, Elizaveta Kozlova captures the details of a day-to- day life which, although ordinary, never seems insipid, so deeply is it infused with the contagious energy of the protagonist. And as the lines of contemporary Russian society and its problems are sketched out, In the Eye of the Storm reveals itself as the portrait of a character undergoing tremendous change.
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.
In the circus tent „Joy” the same thing happens every day – they dismantle and assemble the tent with a dome full of stars, give performances, and move on to the next place. Lynx and parrot trainers quarrel over every little thing, and Valera the clown always performs alone. Until one day a new partner joins him, the clown Yana, and he starts to dream about conquering the world of the circus together with her.
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.
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.
