The famous scientist, academician and art critic Andrei Ilyin, who survived with the Hermitage staff the harsh trials of the Leningrad blockade, returned to his hometown after many years. The whole life of Ilyin is connected with Leningrad. A life that in the distant years of World War II would have seemed to have no future, but which, despite the unbearable horror of hunger and devastation, continued only in the name of the future ...
A thirteen years old Anton escapes home in order to cross the country and get to his brother who works very far away.
King Lear, old and tired, divides his kingdom among his daughters, giving great importance to their protestations of love for him. When Cordelia, youngest and most honest, refuses to idly flatter the old man in return for favor, he banishes her and turns for support to his remaining daughters. But Goneril and Regan have no love for him and instead plot to take all his power from him. In a parallel, Lear's loyal courtier Gloucester favors his illegitimate son Edmund after being told lies about his faithful son Edgar. Madness and tragedy befall both ill-starred fathers.
Bracelet-2 is a grey trotter at a Russian race track stable. Daily beatings from a cold-hearted trainer turns him into an unreliable emotional wreck, and in race after race he breaks his trot and finishes at a gallop, resulting in disqualification. To the trainer Bracelet is worthless, so when World War II breaks out and Soviet Army representatives come to the track to requisition horses for the front, the trainer is only too happy to be rid of him. Now, instead of a racing sulky, Bracelet is forced to pull heavy carts and sleighs laden with munitions. Gradually he resigns to his fate...
Katerina Izmailova is a filmization of Dmitry Shostakovich's long-suppressed 1936 opera. Galina Vishnevskaya stars as Katerina, a bored 19th century farm wife. At the behest of her grungy lover, Katerina murders her husband and her father-in-law. She and her new beau are both sent to Siberia, where the lover almost immediately takes up with a younger woman. Banned by Stalin for its bleak portrait of Soviet life, Katerina Izmailova was not given a Russian staging for over 40 years; its Metropolitan Opera debut did not occur until 1994. Dmitri Shostakovich also wrote the screenplay for the screen version of Katerina Izmailova.
Young Lena becomes a chief manager of a workers' club. The problem is this club is not constructed yet and finishing it takes too much effort from a young girl. The solution is found by her grandmother and her 'old guards'. Look out Lena's enemies. Here's her grandma coming!