Russian

A young Uzbekistani man, whose widower father was a drunkard, finally finds the grown-up mentoring he craves when his father dies and he meets an old man who teaches him about the necessity of resisting tyranny. ~ Clarke Fountain, RoviRead More »

Quote:
For his directing début, Oleg Kovalov chose a very extravagant experiment. As a basis he took a propaganda film from the fifties, The Case of Corporal Kochetkov, dissected this as it were and gave the naked structure a new substance and new accents by re-cutting the shots and adding documentary material from the fifties, such as newsreel footage of Khrushchev’s visit to America and pictures of the visit by Yves Montand and Simone Signoret to Moscow. The film about corporal Kochetkov called on the Soviet citizens to be on their guard and showed how sly the enemy was: for instance it could pose as an innocent girl. Kovalov creams off the emotional froth from this melodrama, deconstructs its codes and subjects it to a thoughtful analysis. For instance he reveals paranoia and spy-phobia, complexes in the ‘collective Soviet unconscious’ that is still active even in relatively enlightened periods.Read More »

Quote:
Tux and Fanny are back and they’re looking for a new home. Come along as they discover VHS tapes hidden under beds, forgotten statues in the desert, and brain biting ladybugs. Will they find a place to call their own or are these two friends destined to roam the land forever?

Eyeballs in the Darkness reminds us that in the dark of the night, we’re all together, eyes wide open, staring at the horizon, waiting for the sun. Written, Directed and Animated by Albert Birney.Read More »

A woman meets a man who isn’t the right man for her – but she hasn’t realised it yet…Read More »

This is an interesting yet bizarre little tale of a fictional (as far as I know, anyway) experiment performed during the Stalin-controlled years in the USSR. The main character is changed from a woman into a man. This is part of a larger plan to change more women into men and have a stronger work-force/army, etc. It’s a very in-depth character study of the main character, who tries to fit into a world that she (now ‘he’) doesn’t really understand, especially since she’s now a man … Stalin dislikes the results of the experiments and has the scientist killed. Read More »

Quote:
Through her very real subject Edgar Figner, director Nathalie Alonso Casale offers us an intimate sense of the 21st-century Russian zeitgeist. A true alchemist, Mr. Figner has spent his life in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) as a sound-effects artist at Lenfilm Studios, where from the silent era to the present he has used commonplace objects (cabbages, old shoes) to create complex sound effects for films. Under the pressures of contemporary Russian life, Figner begins to retreat into a past comprising his own personal history and the history of Russian cinema. As reality and memory blend with stunning scenes from Soviet films, Figner’s art becomes a soundtrack for the muffled culture created by the repression of the Soviet era. This delicate mix of documentary, reality and cinematic imagination creates a deeply sensitive account of the silences at the heart of the Russian social, political and cinematic experience.Read More »

Day Watch (also known as Night Watch 2: The Chalk of Fate), is a sequel to the 2004 film Night Watch, featuring the same cast. It is based on the second and the third part of Sergey Lukyanenko’s novel The Night Watch rather than its follow-up novel Day Watch. It is the second part in the Night Watch trilogy, although the third film (Dusk or Twilight Watch) has not yet been produced.

Plot
A man who serves in the war between the forces of Light and Dark comes into possession of a device that can restore life to Moscow, which was nearly destroyed by an apocalyptic event.Read More »

This short uses Zap Comix-style imagery to present a fable of an unemployed young American who finds a job in a Times Square shooting gallery — as a target. The evil capitalist eventually gets the idea of letting the boy build a family, and employing them all as targets to be shot at.Read More »

A boy finds a special jug and releases an ancient genie. The powerful and kind wizard is ready to fulfill all desires, but he doesn’t know anything about the reality of the 20th century.Read More »