Young woman comes to Moscow for three days. She has to buy a lot to take back to the village. Then she meets a taxi driver. He realizes he cannot lose this woman. But she comes to understand her feelings only later, when she comes back to her village with new buyings, impressions of Moscow and thoughts about unlived life.Read More »
Twenty-year-old Bob rides 1000 km to Moscow on his vintage motorbike to collect a bad debt for his boss; the city chews up and spits out this naive country boy, whose head is full of Easy Rider dreams.Read More »
Quote:
Ivan Got His Gun. Sam Fuller once declared that the only way for cinema to depict war authentically was to spray the audiences with real bullets, here’s the next best thing. The setting is the Nazi devastation of Belarus, the Exodus and the Apocalypse are the main poles: The 12-year-old protagonist (Alexei Kravchenko) digs up a rifle and eagerly runs to join the partisans in the woods, Elem Klimov proceeds to wipe the smile off the wannabe warrior’s face. Left behind, the boy spends an incongruous idyll with a forest nymph (Olga Mironova), complete with rainbows materializing out of morning rain; a squashed bird’s nest sets the stage for the inferno, which is first glimpsed — casually, mind-scarringly — by the side of a cabin. Bombs and bottles rain from the sky, Klimov’s Steadicam skims supernaturally pale meadows, a full menagerie (stork, cow, lemur, lobster) adds to the surrealism.Read More »
This fairy tale film is dedicated to the memory of the great film director Alexander Row, the founder of the genre. Once upon a time there lived a brave and kind hero named Finist the Bright Falcon. He was famous for his strength, courage and a heart of gold. But one day the Russian land was attacked by an evil enemy, Kartaus, who turned our hero into a forest monster. This spell was cast on a condition that Finist might become a man again, should a beautiful girl, Alyonushka, fall in love with him while he was a beast.Read More »
Synopsis:
Two elderly women, who have led remarkable lives, live deep in the Kurdistan region of Iraq. One, born in Russia, fell in love with a Kurdish student and set off to his native village here, where she spent the rest of her life filled with pain, turbulence and violence sparked by war. The other, a matron in the true sense of the word has witnessed numerous deaths and unexplained disappearances of the members of her large family. Their movements are calm, full of determination and wisdom that only old age can bring.
Simple lives that at the same time possess poetic dreamlike qualities, transparent, yet full of profound mystery are an ode to the joy of the ordinary life.Read More »
Synopsis:
An intimate epic about the extraordinary lives of this last Soviet generation, Robin Hessman’s feature documentary debut tells the stories of five Moscow schoolmates who were brought up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessed the joy and confusion of glasnost, and reached adulthood right as the world changed around them. Through candid first-person testimony, revealing verité footage, and vintage home movies, Hessman, who spent many years living in Moscow, reveals a Russia rarely ever seen on film, where people are frank about their lives and forthcoming about their country. Engaging, funny, and positively inspiring, in MY PERESTROIKA politics is personal, honesty overshadows ideology, and history progresses one day, one life at a time.
— (C) International Film CircuitRead More »
Plot
Mischa, a mute boy, sets out on a surrealistic journey together with his father and two men. Their means of transportation is an old Soviet locomotive, loaded with stolen coal. The travellers intend to sell off the loot on their way through the borderless steppes of inner Russia. As a parallel to the main plot, sequences of a mysterious travelling circus keep reappearing in a very suggestive way. Many of the odd artists at the circus are people that the four protagonists encounter in the wilderness along the overgrown railway.Read More »
