Living With an Idiot

Danila goes to his successful brother, Victor, in Petersburg to start a new life. Unknown to Danila, Victor is a contract killer, but is in hiding after asking for too much money to assassinate a Chechen mob boss. To avoid exposure, Victor convinces Danila to kill the boss instead.

A group of Swedish tourists are on the way to a Russian village to witness the so called 'Festivity of Neptunus', in which the inhabitants take a dive in a hole in the ice. This tradition, however, does not exist at all. The inhabitants try to make a good impression by starting the 'tradition' to please the tourists.

The case brings two older women together. Lonely and embittered by the whole world, Zhenya is forced to unite with the eccentric and good-natured Mila in order to get out of the circumstances in which they found themselves thanks to a chance acquaintance with two young frivolous neighbors.

A woman tries to survive the invasion of Berlin by the Soviet troops during the last days of World War II.

While returning to Leningrad from a visit to his brother, Professor Artyom's car breaks down and he finds assistance at an isolated farmhouse occupied by Alexey, his wife, a Vietnamese laborer, and a stranger who wanders around the farm. When his car is repaired, Artyom leaves, drunk on moonshine, and students Valera and Angelika arrive. After Valera gets drunk, the stranger abducts Angelika.

In 1920s Moscow, shortly after the October Revolution, a stray dog named Sharik is taken in by Professor Preobrazhensky, a wealthy and respected surgeon. The professor performs a daring medical experiment on the dog that changes him into a human being. As the newly transformed Sharikov begins to navigate life in the professor’s apartment, his crude behavior and revolutionary ideas turn the household upside down.

Young girl is dreaming to become a cop - so she starts her own investigation into a group of car thieves.

Srubov is a part of CHEKA, the secret police Lenin established after the Bolshevik Revolution. They arrest, interview for a minute, try in ten seconds, and execute intellectuals, aristocrats, Jews, clergy, and their families. In the building basement, five people at a time are shot as they stand naked facing wooden doors. No one to remember their last words; no martyrs, just anonymous bodies. Daily, the kangaroo court, the executions, the loading of bodies onto wagons. Srubov is cold, distant, sexually dysfunctional, and a deep thinker, hated by former friends and his family. As he tries to reason the nature of revolution and the purpose of CHEKA, he slowly goes mad.

Two twenty-year-olds meet each other in the sanatorium and fall in love. Ksenia is an alchoholic, Maxim is suicidal. Gradually it becomes clear that the characters, betrayed by their relatives, kept inside the sanatorium, constrained by regimes and the cult of work therapy, are healthier and freer than many of those who live outside.

Eleven comedic vignettes featuring conversations – some important, some less so – held in restaurants over coffee and cigarettes (how quickly time flies – cigarettes are banned in Russia’s restaurants now). The conversations are candid, and even veer into the territory of murder. In the final credits, the director apologizes to Jim Jarmusch, whose work (in the anthology Coffee and Cigarettes, which Jarmusch shot in pieces over many years) Oldenburg-Svintsov is clearly indebted to. Sex, Coffee, Cigarettes’s kinship with Jarmusch’s film extends to the fact that superstars play tiny roles in almost all of the vignettes.

​Young soldiers in the Soviet Internal Troops are subjected to systematic abuse during their dedovshchina (hazing). The plot unfolds primarily aboard a prisoner transport rail car guarded by a unit of paramilitary conscripts.

A determined student from Chicago is forced to fulfill the last wish of his ailing grandfather. He has to travel to Odessa, Ukraine, and bring back his grandfather's cat.

On the same day, Andrei's wife Nina asks for a divorce, his colleague Natasha tells him she's attracted to him, he's assigned a new project under the direction of Philip (a well-dressed, authoritative, and even arrogant stranger who keeps touching him), and he fights a gang of homophobes to protect a young gay man, Oleg. The next day, Philip takes Andrei away from the office on an odyssey into a space that is charged with spirituality and homoeroticism. Philip is no businessman, and the disclosure of who he really is forces Andrei into a series of choices that involve Natasha, Nina, belief, and love.

The main character in the hospital remembers how a soldier shared food that helped him survive during the war. And then he himself saves the child who fell into the hole...

The action is set in 1970 as the Soviet Union (and the entire progressive world) are preparing to celebrate Lenin's centenary. Not to be outdone, the camp commander decides to have the prisoners put on a play about Lenin's life. However, the ensuing preparations turn everything upside down and seem to offer a God-given chance to plot an escape.

The year is 1917. We are in the Russian countryside. It is the middle of freezing winter. A pale young, newly educated doctor arrives. Having to deal with one medical challenge after another he soon becomes the center of everyone's attention. To soothe the impressions of human suffering he turns to morphine.

Into an era seething with war and revolution, a man comes with an incredible power to heal a nation...or destroy it. Based on the true story of one of the most powerful and mysterious figures in Russian history.

St. Petersburg, early 20th century. The handsome and secretive Johann specializes in shooting erotic pictures depicting the floggings of bare-bottomed women. With the help of his assistants, the photographic creations gradually penetrate the peaceful households of two upper-class Russian families.

A Finn preparing a work on the Russian hunting traditions and customs, comes to Russia to collect materials and is invited to take part in a hunting party. His flamboyant companions include an Army general, with more than a passing resemblance to Aleksander Lebed, a police detective, local forest ranger (a devotee of Zen Buddhism) and some big-city types from St. Petersburg. Inevitably, their good intentions soon give way to endless drinking, visits to local farm girls and much else besides.

The final part of Mikhalkov's trilogy about Divisional Commander Kotov finds him returning home during World War II having been betrayed, narrowly escaped execution for treason and nearly reduced to dust in a prison camp. Only to discover that everything has changed and he will have to fight again for his name, for his honor, and for his love.

Vocational school student, who took upon himself the guilt of another for a large sum of money, finds himself in a very difficult situation. None of his “friends” even tries to come to his aid. He only finds one way out for himself, - a death...

Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".

Assia lives in a small Russian village, populated by useless alcoholics. She sells eggs and alcohol to her neighbours, and everybody is happy. However, one day, her hen lays a golden egg, and Assia may have a golden opportunity.

A story of a Moscow's apartment building that is slowly falling apart, literally. First, the hot water has been cut off by an old man from Asia, who could not stand it being wasted. Then the roof is starting to collapse. Finally, the electricity has been cut off. All the tenants of the building, no matter how different they were, find themselves in the same situation.

Closely based on Franz Kafka's book "Das Schloß", the movie shares the same action on a land surveyor who is called to a village to do a job that no one seems to have ordered. Once there, he takes up the struggle against bureaucracy emanating from the castle.

Thriller providing a chilling insight into the damaged psyche of Russian soldiers returning home from Afghanistan. Andrei is the drug-crazed leader of the Zinky Boys, who make a living on the black market in the underground railway, where a serial killer is on the loose.

A rare astronomical phenomenon — the parade of planets — has a strange effect on several men. The heroes of the film — an astrophysicist, locksmith, salesman, architect, loader, trolley bus driver — are called up for military training, which ends ahead of time. There is a strange pause in their life — no one knows where they are, no one is waiting for them, and they themselves can not rush anywhere. This short respite in a hasty and busy life gives the heroes the opportunity to experience strong and very important feelings for them.

A comedy about a New Year Eve celebration in one very funny hospital.

Nikolai (played by Sergei Dontsov) has been fired from his job as a music teacher and has to live in the gym until he finds a place to stay. Finally, he gets a communal room in the apartment of Gorokhov (Victor Mikhalkov). The room's previous inhabitant, an old lady, has died a year ago, and yet her cat, Maxi, is still in the locked room, healthy and fat. Soon, Nikolai and his neighbours discover the mystery: there is a window to Paris in the room. That's when the comedy begins - will the Russians be able to cope with the temptation to profit from the discovery?

Nobody knows what's waiting for us around the corner. On the last day of her 13th birthday, following a rabbit into a St. Petersburg gateway by a strange attraction, Alice suddenly finds herself in a mysterious forest. A place where everything is the other way around. To the wild sounds of a piano, which is driven along country roads on a tractor, Alice meets a wild company that, instead of St. Valentine's Day, celebrates the feast of St. Tryphon the Mouser, unable to leave the festive table from winter to summer because of the curse of the Elder, who punished them for "blasphemy." Helping to solve this problem, Alice receives a motorcycle as a gift - both a dream and a means of transportation - and sets off on a journey. Where will it lead her? What awaits her, a lonely and strong girl? And most importantly, why did she tag along with the white rabbit? Who are her parents? And who is she really...

Based on Hungarian fairytales.

In the second movie the Naval Cadets are guarding the princess coming from Germany to marry a Russian prince.

Sixteen-year-old Andrei Eremin considered himself a person who did not depend on the opinion of the majority, and was proud of it. And he had few friends. One day his imaginary independence collapsed - he believed slander and committed an act unworthy of a man - he easily believed the gossip spread by his classmates about Rita, with whom he had warm friendly relations, and even hastened to assure that he was indifferent to her. Having accidentally overheard a conversation between his comrades about himself, in which Valerka, his best friend, took part, he quarreled with him too. Time has passed. Rita, who was painfully experiencing a break with Andrei, found support, tenderness and understanding in Valerka, Eremin’s friend, he is simpler, without ambitions, but much more reliable and generous in spirit. And yet, after this story, a feeling of bitterness remained with them too - after all, Andrei was once their friend...

An unusual story that happened a long time ago in the city of Eulenberg, in a house where a terrible Ghost lived...

Arriving on an excursion to St. Petersburg, classmates Dana and Lyova witness the theft of the famous "Chizhik-Pyzhik". According to legend, if you make a wish and get a coin on the pedestal of the monument without dropping it into the water, it will surely come true. But "Chizhik" is gone. Does this mean that the guys will never be able to realize their dreams and Lyova's parents will still get divorced, and Dana will not become a famous blogger? Courageous schoolchildren rush in search of kidnappers, hiding from teachers, parents urgently summoned from Yekaterinburg, policemen and even from themselves.... "Peter the Great".

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time. Subjects of the film include directors Barbet Schroeder, Nagisa Oshima, Volker Schlöndorff, Ken Loach, Benjamin Cuq, Youssef Chahine, Wim Wenders, Joseph Losey, Jean-Luc Godard, Samuel Fuller and Terry Gilliam, chess grandmaster Joël Lautier, and actors Roberto Benigni, Stéphane Audran, Julie Delpy and Lesley Chatterley. Gilliam is featured eating a 100-franc note, while Fuller smokes a cigar. Courant's favourite subject was a 7-month-old baby. The film was screened in its then-entirety in Avignon in November 2009 and was screened in Redondo Beach, CA on April 9, 2010.

It was a time with a rise of artistic life in the former capital of Russia. But the rise ended quickly and tragically with arrests and executions. Modern St. Petersburg and Petrograd of 1921 strangely and intricately intertwine in the mind of the director. The cruel, bloody, but romantic world of the first years of the Revolution converge with the artistic and domestic life of contemporary filmmaking on the same ground, on the same streets and squares.