Russia

Quote:
It is already a challenge to make a film on death and call it Living. But Sigarev fearlessly gets to the very heart of things, where life, death, God, love and the imagination form an indestructible whole. A harsh and sometimes brutal experience, but catharsis will follow.

Vasily Sigarev’s second feature, after his acclaimed Wolfy, is an existential portrait of protagonists living in a wintry Russian province. A mother wants to reunite with her twin daughters. A young couple marry in church, but immediately after the ceremony, God – or maybe the Devil, or maybe Blind Fate – tests their love in the most brutal way. A boy wants to see his estranged father, despite his mother’s violent protests. Each of these characters lives through their own ordeal.Read More »

Farmer Ivan Dunaev gets up early. He feeds his piglets, does paperwork, fixes the tractor, and weighs the meat he’ll take in his old pickup truck to the market to sell. He has a wife, a teenage daughter, and a young son. And he loves to hunt. His world revolves around these things. Then, one day, two new workers, Lyuba and Raya, on work release from the local prison colony, arrive on the farm. Ivan doesn’t notice it at first, but something begins to change.Read More »

AMG (allrovi.com): Maria Saakyan’s elegiac, semi-autobiographical slice-of-life drama The Lighthouse (2006) unfolds in the very early ’90s, against the backdrop of the Caucasus wars that plagued Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. As the scope of this mass-scaled conflict extends itself to one woman’s small village, she is forced to drop everything, move to Moscow, and start over from scratch — thus bidding farewell to her hometown and way of life, perhaps indefinitely.Read More »

Quote:
A once-promising athlete whose career was cut short due to a tragic injury turns to a life of crime, and receives an unusual gift that leads him to make a series of rash decisions. Lesha Shultes is only twenty-five years old, but his best days are already behind him. He was set to take the world of sports by storm when a serious car accident rendered him unable to compete on the playing field. Now, the only way Lesha can communicate with the outside world is by stealing. In between bouts of picking pockets on the streets, Lesha visits his ailing mother and his brother in the Army. Lesha has been effectively cut off from all human emotion. It’s only when he receives a video from a girl that he previously robbed that Lesha begins to feel something oddly familiar somewhere deep within.Read More »

PLOT:
The fanciful tale of an introverted little girl who grows up believing she has the power to make wishes come true.
She must reconcile this belief with reality when, as a young woman, she journeys to Moscow and grapples with love,
modernity and materialism.Read More »

From Rockfilm.ru
Rock
It became a cult movie for an entire generation. And it’s significance only increases as the years pass. Rock musicians who were the founders of contemporary rock culture are captured here in their youth: giants such as Boris Grebenshchikov, Yuri Shevchuk, Viktor Tsoi, Oleg Garkusha, and Anton Adasinsky. “Rock” is a film about fate and about music; it is the portrait of a generation. Director Uchitel observes his characters up close, and offers up the same unique opportunity to his audience.
Read More »

Marina (Dihovichnaya) is a gorgeous upper-crust Muscovite with an opulent wardrobe and good-looking husband to match. She’s employed as a social worker, a profession offering meager financial rewards. Thankfully her affluent father provides the supplementary income her job — and her hapless husband — cannot. Yet instead of finding contentment in her win-win situa­tion, Marina carries on an affair with her best friend’s husband, and also initiates a bizarre series of erotic encounters with a deadbeat cop who previously raped her.Read More »

Dovlatov charts six days in the life of brilliant, ironic writer who saw far beyond the rigid limits of 70s Soviet Russia. Sergei Dovlatov fought preserve his own talent and decency with poet and writer Joseph Brodsky while watching his artist friends getting crushed by the iron-willed state machinery.Read More »

Oleg is a young gifted paramedic. His wife Katya works at the hospital emergency department. She loves Oleg, but is fed up with him caring more about patients than her. She tells him she wants a divorce. The new head of Oleg’s EMA substation is a cold-hearted manager who’s got new strict rules to implement. Oleg couldn’t care less about the rules – he’s got lives to save. His attitude gets him in trouble with the new boss. The crisis at work coincides with the personal life crisis. Caught between emergency calls, alcohol-fueled off-shifts, and search for a meaning in life, Oleg and Katya have to find the binding force that keeps them together.Read More »