In the Apocalypse of John, there is such a thing as warmth. Being angry with the Laodicean church, the Lord reproaches: “I know your deeds; you are neither cold nor hot. ” Cold, that is, a sinner who denies or arguing with God, is not hopeless, he can come to salvation through repentance, but a...
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...
A young sailor descends from a local train. He goes to a nearby forest, which is full of strange men in medical uniforms behaving in an absurd and eccentric manner. The sailor falls under their influence and masochistically gives himself up to them only to be disemboweled by the werewolf orderlies....
A biologist, obsessed with the idea of writing a treatise on a new kind of mouse, becomes witness to a number of bizarre and horrific events, from his son's suicide, to the S&M engaged in by respectable middle-aged men, to his own family's psychic morbidity.
Poetic portrait of a filmmaker. The famous director reflects on creativity and love. His friends and associates take part in the film: artist Vladimir Shinkarev, engineer Vladimir Nikolaev, actress Elena Kramer (Spiridonova), director, film critic Oleg Kovalov, necrorealist directors Yevgeny Yufit,...
The main character is crazy about about depicting various anomalies in art. Accidentally he finds a cinematography archive which makes him advance a completely new theory on the reasons why humans became bipedal. Yufit proceeds with the plot by describing a scientist struggling against the epidemic...
One of the most structured of Yufit’s reels with an elaborated montage work. This film combines three diverse worlds in an absurd manner to show the author’s passion for black humour: traditions of the avant garde cinematography of 20s, the social motives of contemporary Russia, and forensic...
The protagonist of The Wooden Room is a director of documentaries, who lives with his wife - who is as stoic as he - in an isolated hut in the woods. The director is obsessed by filming marginal events in life. The closer he can get to these events with his camera, the more he becomes involved with...
This film was shot in 1988. The main action takes place in a rock group's studio during the visit of a few acolytes from Theatre Theatre. It is all served up in connection with Fassbinder «s notion of Antitheatre. The theme of the “mad prince” in actors» improvisations intertwines with the...
An anthropologist investigates the origins of human evolution. She had suffered a mental trauma during her childhood when her father, a submarine captain, died during the war. This trauma periodically destabilizes her condition. The ghosts of a prehistoric past and a violent death collide in the...
A three-minute long insight into the life of completely unusual people – a group of pacifists forced into hiding in the cellar of a ruinous house to escape a war tribunal. The difficulties of war are manly endured by the film’s characters. This film, like most of Yufit’s works, shows his love...
St. Petersburg banter on the topic of Mozart’s stay in present-day St. Petersburg. Mozart loved Salieri very much. Together they messed around in a tavern. However, Mozart never drank with Salieri - he offered his glass to one of his friends. Friends were very unhappy...
Violence in the snow! One of the most radical shorts ever made behind the iron curtain, a special document of the Necrorealists' art group, in the former USSR. "Lesorub" (Lumberjack) is a reaction full of energy and morbid rage against the rigid rules of socialist realism - Claus Loeser, Gegenbilder
The necrorealist science fiction plot involves a team of scientists attempting to cross a human being with a tree, and a special unit dispatched to hunt down the zombie-like mutants created in a previous, failed experiment
Vasily Ivanovich once met with his killer… Collectivism, freedom, stupidity, fun - the main principles of the St. Petersburg underground are filmed with the help of a new myth about the heroic Chapai.
In 2000, Masha Godovannaya curated a programme entitled Avant-Garde Alternatives: An Evolution of American Experimental Film, which went on tour in Russia, making stops in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. We visited necro-realist film-maker Yevgeny Yufit at his house beside Lake Seliger,...
