A young woman who grew up in orphanage is longing to be loved, but does not have it in her to love others. Her teenage looks help her while falsely accused of committing a crime to hide in a orphanage without arousing any suspicion. There, she meets a 13 years old homeless person like herself, Kristina, and together they set out on a long journey to a small town in Kazakhstan, where Kristina’s grandmother lives…Read More »
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Sometimes we know less about the past than about the future. Alekseev, a lonely old man, unexpectedly discovers that he has not lived the life he thought he had, and finds himself to be a completely different person.Read More »
Industrial city of Norilsk: factories, cold, chemical air. The only desire of young people living here is to leave, against all odds. A docu-style, emotionally-driven drama about a young girl desperately fighting for an escape which is so blurry, and for love which is so insecure.
Due to its vast industrial areas and enormous industrial output, the Russian city of Norilsk has become one of the most polluted places in the world. However, despite the persistent ecological crisis, the severe northern climate and harsh living conditions, life goes on there in its own extreme, as well as routine, way. But the will to live that such an existence fosters is actually the will, or rather the dream, to escape, especially for a young generation. A desperate, hardly possible dream that moves and traps its adherents, turning against them.Read More »
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Oriental Elegy (1996). Visually impressionistic, atmospherically dense, and narratively opaque, Oriental Elegy is the surreal journey of a displaced spirit (Aleksandr Sokurov) as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question – “What is happiness?” – an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness. Through abstractly textured imagery and indelibly hypnotic dreamscapes, Sokurov composes a metaphoric, sensual, and evocative tone poem on a soul’s search for enlightenment and the essential survival of human consciousness.Read More »
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Sanja the Bandit, after a particularly vicious shootout, stumbles into the musician Oleg at the local banya. Following a retelling of a semi-mythological story, the pair decide to make a pilgrimage to a “bell-tower of happiness”.Read More »
Richard Harris stars as a foreign entrepreneur, who ventures to Russia in 1885 with dreams of selling a new, experimental steam-driven timber harvester in the wilds of Siberia. Julia Ormond portrays his assistant, who falls in love with a young Russian officer, played by Russian star Oleg Menshikov, and spends the next 10 years perfecting the harvester and pursuing her love, who has been exiled to Siberia.
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Based on the novel of the same name, Trydno byt bogom (AKA Hard to be a God) has been transferred to film at least once before. Frustrated explorers from Earth observe the chaotic and oppressive lives of a society on a distant planet that has yet to progress beyond the middle ages.
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Synopsis: One Monday morning Katya, Vika and Zhanna learn that there will be a school disco, their first disco, on the coming Saturday night. The girls feverishly start preparing for the event, which rapidly becomes the most important moment ever in their universe, and looks like the ideal way to escape their daily lives…
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The new film “Detochki” (Kids) opens at the gate of the Dandelion Children’s Home in an unknown provincial town. Inside, the town’s rich and powerful are bedding (or getting ready to bed) the home’s very young charges when a knife flies into one of their throats. Soon, seven pedophiles have been stabbed to death by a group of kids from a local children’s home.
With that shocking start, “Detochki” grabs the viewer and doesn’t let go, as the murderous children, dressed in black hoodies with knives hidden up their sleeves, face up against the city’s corrupt and heinous citizens and, the viewer knows, Russia’s too.
The film, directed by Dmitry Astrakhan, has sparked huge controversy since it opened Apr. 3, even though it’s only showing at a few cinemas in Moscow. Some critics say it’s dangerous and advocates vigilante justice.Read More »