Russia

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An unsettling portrayal of provincial Russia, laced with humour and lyricism
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Egor Matveev, played by Ivan Dobronravov, is a young driver journeying to a small town in the middle of nowhere, reencountering old friends and looking for love. In director Svetlana Proskurina’s words, ‘The main theme of the movie is the search for one’s inner self. Some find it when they are 70 and some when they are 20. The main character is a naïve sincere boy, who is in process of finding his inner self but it’s a dramatic process.’ A shocking and profound film, but not without its light moments. Also starring the outragous Russian rock musician Sergei Shnurov.Read More »

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The fun-loving theater director Givi is torn from his complacency when he and a group of friends witness a brutal crime in an underpass. Filled with remorse over his inaction, he begins to radically question his life, his relationships, and his work. How can art be created if one is indifferent to life? What responsibility does everyone have towards society? The shocking experience becomes the trigger for a deeply felt confrontation with his very personal attitude to the world.Read More »

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Sailing ships, stars, angels and executioners The Mark of Cain chronicles the vanishing practice and language of Russian Criminal Tattoos. Captured in some of Russias most notorious prisons, including the fabled White Swan, the film traces the animus of the flowers of this carnal art by way of the brutality of its origins- the penitentiary and the criminal environment. Incisive interviews with prisoners, guards, and criminologists reveal the secret language of The Zone and The Code of Thieves of the vory v zakone. As early as the 1920s, Russian prisons and Gulag began to attract the attention of researchers.Read More »

Alika Aldanova—the heroine of the cult film Assa, who twenty-two years ago killed her lover Andrei Krymov—is released from prison where she has given birth to a daughter. Her new life holds in store some complex twists of fate: a well-known director invites Alika to act in the film Anna Karenina.

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This Assa is about freedom that has been bought with money; it is a story that happens to all of us.
— Sergey SolovyovRead More »

Sasha is a young girl living in a block flat with her family in Moscow. Once she falls in love with Antonin, a bohemian artist and hard drinker. Their short love affair is pulling her down, to the bottom of her subconscious. Overwhelmed with beautiful and frightening visions, she starts to paint – violently, until she can stand on her feet.Read More »

In the midst of the Chechen War, a remote psychiatric institution is left without staff leaving the patients to fend for themselves. Based on a true story.Read More »

A few summer days of three ordinary Moscow girls on threshold of adulthood. Farewell to childhood in yards, where everything is for the first time – from secretly bought cigarettes and cans of G&T to first love and almost real tragedies.Read More »

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Andrei leads a group of nationalist skinheads. They’ve taken over a Luna Park depot. They indulge in violence and racketeering against Jews, homosexuals and the marginalized.Read More »

Based on Kafka’s story of the same name, “The Metamorphosis” tells the story of a traveling salesman, Gregor Samsa, who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into a gigantic insect.Read More »