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 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.
Russian photographer Maksim Dmitriev liked reality, and in the beginning of the 20 century, he photographed bums, workers, farmers, bankers, and monks. Hundred yours later we showed these photographs to nowadays heroes. And they recognized each other.
In a small village on the slopes of the former coal mines, Oleg Pavlov, the father of many children, screens the "Little Prince" of Exupery. The camera is the cheapest, bought for retirement. In the roles - Oleg and his four children. Two years of filming and editing - and journalists from all over Russia are on a visit to an amazing creative and friendly family. But the family never calls his father at the table. Children refuse to go to the premiere of the film. And Oleg himself does not go to spend the eldest daughter, when she leaves to live in another city. He just sleeps. And no one wakes him up.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.
Everyone has their own buzz. For him, the high is war. He was in love with the war as a woman, and the feelings did not go away. He can't go back into battle. All he has now is the house of mercy, the monastery on the next street, and the desire to start a different life.
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 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.
Zhenya Myshkin is almost an ordinary teenager. He lives in Kamchatka in a foster family. Summer is in full swing, you can lie on the river, compose poems, do whatever you want. Life seems endless, but autumn is ahead, which means a trip to a correctional boarding school, which should become a new home for Zhenya.
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.
Nikita is 25 years old and has a rare genetic condition that makes his skin very fragile and untreatable. Such people are usually called "butterflies". Together with his girlfriend Leroy, they are looking for a way to stop the development of the disease and get acquainted with famous scientists Alla and Vadim Zorin, who agree to conduct an experimental treatment.
Last road in the ambulance. The driver - a cheerful Armenian - comes to those who can no longer be helped and becomes for them a guide between life and death. The road, meanwhile, shines with bright lights, erodes in an abstract pattern, yells with sirens. There is an inexorable countdown.
