Russia

Marina (Dihovichnaya) is a gorgeous upper-crust Muscovite with an opulent wardrobe and good-looking husband to match. She’s employed as a social worker, a profession offering meager financial rewards. Thankfully her affluent father provides the supplementary income her job — and her hapless husband — cannot. Yet instead of finding contentment in her win-win situa­tion, Marina carries on an affair with her best friend’s husband, and also initiates a bizarre series of erotic encounters with a deadbeat cop who previously raped her.Read More »

Dovlatov charts six days in the life of brilliant, ironic writer who saw far beyond the rigid limits of 70s Soviet Russia. Sergei Dovlatov fought preserve his own talent and decency with poet and writer Joseph Brodsky while watching his artist friends getting crushed by the iron-willed state machinery.Read More »

Oleg is a young gifted paramedic. His wife Katya works at the hospital emergency department. She loves Oleg, but is fed up with him caring more about patients than her. She tells him she wants a divorce. The new head of Oleg’s EMA substation is a cold-hearted manager who’s got new strict rules to implement. Oleg couldn’t care less about the rules – he’s got lives to save. His attitude gets him in trouble with the new boss. The crisis at work coincides with the personal life crisis. Caught between emergency calls, alcohol-fueled off-shifts, and search for a meaning in life, Oleg and Katya have to find the binding force that keeps them together.Read More »

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Two 17-year-old Moscow girls, Olya and Sasha, are going to the Crimea to meet Olya’s father Sergey. Sergey has lived in a small seaside village his whole life and has never seen his daughter. At the threshold of her father’s house, Olya gets scared of meeting him. She asks Sasha “to trade places with her”. So Sasha introduces herself as Olya and pretends to be Sergey’s daughter while Olya claims to be her best friend. Little did they know that this innocent joke will turn into great drama and change their lives forever.Read More »

IMDB:
User Reviews

Mockva
29 November 2005 | by severaloptions (United States)

I took the movie very seriously. Of course it is a black farce. But not only so.

I love to watch this movie. The director captured my attention and held it. The acting is extremely well-done down to the smallest gesture. The dialogue is meaningful; the silences even more so. Tatyana Drybich found her role here.

To me the movie uses this medium of dark farce to make some uncomfortable points about the course of Russia. That is obvious. But also it talks about what is meaningful to anyone. I think the dentist has an important role in the film, and his character is particularly well-done. Bravo!!! Very moving, poignant.Read More »

It’s just another normal Saturday in Ukraine but Valery Kabysh, a young party official, sees panic on the faces of those in charge of the Chernobyl power station where a reactor tower has exploded. As he tries to rally together the woman he loves and his friends he finds all his attempts to get out of town are thwarted by the roots that have attached each and everyone of them to the place they live and work. All the while deadly plumes of radioactive smoke are silently rising up into the atmosphere.

3 Wins, 9 NominationsRead More »

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Today the Russian philosophy known as Cosmism has been largely forgotten. Its utopian tenets – combining Western Enlightenment with Eastern philosophy, Russian Orthodox traditions with Marxism – inspired many key Soviet thinkers until they fell victim to Stalinist repression. In his three-part film project, artist Anton Vidokle probes Cosmism’s influence on the twentieth century and suggests its relevance to the present day. In Part One he returns to the foundations of Cosmist thought (This Is Cosmos, 2014). Part Two explores the links between cosmology and politics (The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, 2015) and Part Three restages the museum as a site of resurrection, a central Cosmist idea (Immortality and Resurrection for All!, 2017).Read More »

On a frozen dark night in remote Siberia, a group of strangers travel home together in a van. When the driver refuses to stop for an elder, a darkening shadow looms over what could possibly be the most tragic night of their lives. This dramatic and thrilling feature with its poetic pacing and exquisite cinematography is easily one of Lukachevskyi’s finest works.

Winner — Best Dramatic Feature — 15th International Film Festival of Indigenous Peoples ImagineNATIVE in TorontoRead More »

Loveless (winner of the Jury Prize at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival) is a Russian drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev – acclaimed director of Leviathan, and The Return.

The story concerns two separated parents who have lost their young son and attempt to find him. It was shot in Moscow, with international support after the Russian government disapproved of Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film Leviathan. Loveless opened at Cannes to critical acclaim.

In Moscow, a married couple, Zhenya and Boris, are in the midst of obtaining a divorce, with much animosity. They have a 12-year-old son, Alyosha, who witnesses the two arguing heatedly. Alyosha afterwards vanishes. Boris and Zhenya appeal to police for assistance in finding the boy, but the police reply they are too busy and tell them to find volunteers for search and rescue instead.Read More »