Foreignland

Victor Sluzhkin signs on as a teacher of geography in a secondary school in his native Perm (in the Urals) and gets lost in a haze of hard vodka, desperate love for a nymphet-like student and the stress of educating teenagers. Geographer, as the students immediately dub Sluzhkin, attempts to escape from the grueling, dull, stultifying reality of Russia's provincial life in a rafting tour to the Urals. Accompanied by wild, adventure-seeking adolescents, faced with the numerous grim surprises of the nature, Geographer is poised to find himself and his own truth.

A very typical post-Soviet era storyline. A bunch of vagabonds lured an innocent teenage girl to their apartment, offered her a drink, intimidated, then gang raped her. Local cops are incapable to undertake an adequate actions against the scoundrels - prevented by the superior chief of the local police, who is the dad of one of the scumbags. The case is closed. The girl's granddad tired of an endless circumlocution decides to take revenge in his own hands.

There is no single truth in love. Each treads their own path. Which should take precedence – passion or duty? How do we choose? And who gets to judge? These are the eternal questions, remorselessly thrust upon us by life. Anna Karenina made her choice, leaving her son Sergei to grow up struggling to understand why his mother took such a tragic and terrible path, and Count Vronsky haunted by the memory of the woman for whose death he still blames himself 30 years later. In 1904, in the aftermath of one of the battles of the Russo-Japanese war, Sergei Karenin and Alexei Vronsky find themselves thrown together in a remote Manchurian village, where fate offers them a chance to return to the events long past and, finally, to find the answers both have long been seeking.

Day of the Full Moon, a series of vignettes from Russia past and present, summons the spirit of Ophuls’ La Ronde, Altman’s Nashville and Short Cuts, and the time-shifting strategies of Resnais (Mon Oncle d’Amérique) to tell provocative, connected stories illustrating the waltz of years and whim of memory. In 1948, a young man, a boy, and a waiter are captivated during the full moon by a mysterious woman in a lilac dress. The effects of this event ripple across the years, washing over more than 80 characters, including a disc jockey, a fairy princess, a gangster, Alexander Pushkin, and a nostalgic dog. But which of these are dreams, and which reality? Director Shakhnazarov continues his career-long focus on the intersection of past and present with this mysterious, exhilarating mosaic of humankind, which in the end both seduces and satisfies.

Simultaneously nihilistic and heartening, Ward No. 6 is based on a story by Chekov, in which a psychiatric doctor becomes a patient in his own asylum. Updated to contemporary Russia, the film is a cocktail of anxieties and riddles, showcasing how easy it is to become what we fear most.

1943. Sasha is 8 years old, he has become mute after losing his parents. Now attempts to contact the outside world occur through the "dots" and "dashes" of Morse code. When Mikhail Viktorovich, an elderly tuner, appears in their communal apartment, the boy is convinced that he is a spy. Now his task is to save his loved ones by telling them about it.

The young director tries to make a movie, following the script of the venerable playwright as much as possible.

An inspiring poetic-aesthetic fairy tale about the search for love.

The heroine, a lonely woman, falls in love with a young businessman very similar to a childhood friend. Everything separates them, the age difference, the social position and this creates a multitude of obstacles, sad or ridiculous, to the realization of their aspirations. But how to imagine that this man, who was trying at the beginning to get rid of an intruder, comes to a declaration of love accompanied by flowers.