Russian

Introduction
A group of activists risk their lives fighting for LGBTQ+ rights in Chechnya.Read More »

Quote:
The setting for this off-beat drama of love and jealousy is the Pushkin Poetry Festival in Boldino. Liosha (Oleg Yankovsky) and his wife Tania (Tatiana Drubich) are walking through the plush forest around Boldino when a mysterious figure pops up from behind a tree and asks the couple a question on an esoteric point of Pushkin scholarship. From that strange beginning, the man, whose name is Klimov (Alexander Abdulov), starts to ease himself into the couple’s private space, and trouble ensues. Complementing this story is the festival itself, enactments of Pushkin’s works, and emotional debates among the festival-goers over the meaning of his poetry.Read More »

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Originally produced to mark the 50th birthday of Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Stalker), Moscow Elegy is a stunning documentary and subjective portrait of the legendary filmmaker by Alexander Sokurov, director of Russian Ark and Tarkovsky’s spiritual heir.Read More »

13-year-old Masha grows in the 90s in Russia between the boxing ring and the street. Her friends occasionally kill and rob people. The whole town hates and fears them, but for Masha they are the best people in the world who love and protect her. She sings jazz and dreams of becoming a singer. One day, Masha finds out who her friends really are and what they have done to her life and family. Having matured, she leaves her small hometown for Moscow, trying to break away from the past. But it overtakes her and brings her back to the place where her childhood passed away.Read More »

Plot:
World War II veteran Kuzma Kuzmich Iordanov has become a heavy drinker with no interest in finding employment of any kind. He joins a collective farm, claiming to be the father of Natasha, a resident there, and is forced to analyze his life when he finds himself falling in love.Read More »

In the Soviet Union of the 1960s, some technologists saw computers as machines of communism and cybernetics as an answer to the difficulties of a waning centrally planned economy. After Scarcity is a sci-fi video-essay that tracks these Soviet cyberneticians in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future.Read More »

Kanopy wrote:
Winter 2015, Belarus. The presidential election is brewing. The omnipotent Lukashenko is running for a 5th. mandate at the head of this martyred country: devastated by World War II and then by Chernobyl. Kostia has just turned 18. He lives in the countryside, surrounded by his relatives: his grandmother who follows the presidential campaign on TV, the neighbor, a political opponent who restores the statues of the church, a photographer friend who dreams of being a reporter, a classmate not very shy, but jealous … A colorful daily life, based on resourcefulness and mutual aid. An arbitrary and absurd world too, where everyone tries to find a meaning, a dream, a project … From her birthday to his first vote, Kostia takes us along in his discovery of his fellow human beings, his country and his future.Read More »

Quote:
Aleksander Sokurov brings the treasures of the Hermitage back into the light by making films about artists and their paintings. He has chosen the painter Hubert Robert, who spent a long time in Italy, and whose preference was for creating ancient ruined landscapes and naturalistic portrayals of times past. He was successful with the wealthy, who bought his works from him. The camera pans across the paintings while Sokurov speaks of a happy era, when the artist was at one with the spirit of the times, and agreed with the taste of his clients. Just how far removed from us this is, is shown by pictures of a “Nô” performance which are inter-cut on the screen. No words are necessary to describe what everybody knows todayRead More »

Plot
“Sisters” focuses on two step-siblings, thirteen-year-old Sveta, a sullen tomboy (played by Oksana Akinshina from Lilya 4-ever), and eight-year-old Dina, a spoilt little princess. When their gangster father, recently released from jail, refuses to handover stolen money to a rival gang, they threaten to kidnap his youngest daughter. The two girls find they must bury their differences and go on the run.Read More »