Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The...
Set in the early 1920s after the end of the Russian Civil War, Red Army soldier Nikita returns to his hometown to see his partner Lyuba, both of whom are scarred by the trauma of the Russian Empire of yesteryear.
The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I, and in spirit (although not in story) it reflects the play which inspired it, the ferociously antiwar Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. A large group of family and friends have gathered...
Martha, a young teacher, suffers from persecution mania. The phantom of an organization like the KGB arises in her mind and gradually materializes. Fear turns into reality, which drives the heroine crazy.
Volodya, who lives with his mother in the apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, gets a pre-revolutionary book on magic rituals of Africa. Reading it, Vladimir realizes that he became an owner the supernatural gift – he can kill people by his own will.
Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the...
Having learned that the empty monastery is facing a thorough reconstruction, the architect decides to capture it alone and prepare design documentation for the restoration of this monument of history and culture. But the monastery turns out to be far from empty. Besides him, a strange old woman...
A 1993 Russian language drama film directed by Andrei Dobrovolsky, starring Aleksey Petrenko, Aleksandra Butorina and Aleksandr Adabashyan. The film screened at International Film Festival Rotterdam in 1994.
Albania in the 1960s, the city of Gjirokastra. Katya, a graduate of the Philology Department of Moscow State University, marries an Albanian, a young historian whom she met in Moscow. Soon after Katya enters into a dialogue with the dictator Enver Hoxha at an art exhibition, her husband is arrested...
"The fate of a person can not only be explained, but also predicted, using the same laws according to which a screenplay is built," says Yuri Arabov, a well–known Russian screenwriter, winner of the Cannes Film Festival. One day, an inexplicable, at first glance, event occurred in the fate of...
