15 August 1990. Viktor Tsoi, the Soviet Union’s most famous rock star, leader of the band Kino, a symbol of freedom and change, dies in an accident on a Latvian highway. The bus driver who was involved in the tragic accident will bring his body back to Leningrad. A party of mourners – Tsoi’s wife and her new boyfriend, his mistress, his producer, his young son and an obsessed photographer – are part of the trip back. This is going to be a long trip, the perfect occasion for an agonizing unravelling of love, jealousy, ambition, and greed.
Mark Ginzburg is a talented artist who is always depressed. He's 52, but personal and professional success has escaped him. Many years ago, Mark moved from his native Riga to Tel Aviv to get away from his oppressive father, Viktor, who still supports him financially. Victor Ginzburg is a famous conductor. His work is his life. He never cared about Mark's feelings and tried to mold his son in his own image. Their highs and lows turned long ago into a love-hate relationship. More hate than love. Father calls his son by his childhood nickname Birdie, which infuriates the son. Son calls his father Your Majesty, which infuriates the father. After Viktor is diagnosed with a fatal illness, the father and son set off on a difficult journey that leads from hate to love.
It portrays the memories of Matilda Kshesinskaya and her love affair with the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II. Matilda, a Polish-born ballerina from the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, had a brief and intense romance with Nicholas between 1892 and 1894, before Nicholas married Alexandra Feodorovna and was crowned Tsar after his father's death. It also explores their relationship, facing societal pressures and interference from Nicholas's mother, Empress Maria Feodorovna, as well as Matilda's involvement with other members of the imperial family, the Romanovs, such as Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich and Grand Duke Andrei Vladimirovich.
A year from the life of a first-grader and his parents.
A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization, which is in the Medieval phase of its own history, to find the right path to progress. Their task is a difficult one: they cannot interfere violently and in no case can they kill. The scientist Rumata tries to save the local intellectuals from their punishment and cannot avoid taking a position.
The action takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War in the Siberian hinterland, among Russians and Germans with damaged personal stories and a strange transformation: the victors seem to be crawling into the skins of the defeated, and vice versa. Ignat, is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the Soviet victorious warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, although not completely destroyed. Trains become fetish for the heroes of the film, and speed becomes a mania; they virtually become one with their steam engines, while the machines take on human names. The heroes set up an almost fatal race in the Siberian forest, risking their own lives and those of others.
After the murder of Krymov, Alika was sentenced to prison. In prison, she falls into the hands of a fragment of the novel "Anna Karenina". By pure chance, a director comes to the colony to select the heroines for the film of the same name, and Alika is trusted to play one of the roles...20 years have passed. Now Alika is a popular actress, she has a daughter. In a new life, psychological and criminal circumstances are again intertwined.
During the post-WW2 reconstruction in Russia, bald-headed technocrat Drozhdov equates communism with the empowerment of the ordinary man over the arrogant "specialness" of genius. Dedicated scientist Lopatkin takes refuge in Moscow with the potty, brilliant old inventor Busko. Lopatkin works tirelessly on his invention, embarking on a roller-coaster of rejection and acceptance, his work vilified, plucked apart and plagiarized by colleagues, particularly by his nemesis Drozhdov. Drozhdov's wife Natasha, alienated from her cold, controlling husband, is increasingly drawn to Lopatkin, whom she knew when they both taught at the same school. Soon she runs away from her husband and happily keeps house for the two absent-minded ex-professors Lopatkin and Busko. Natasha is ready to give Lopatkin her own life, love and faith. Lopatkin is eager to sacrifice his life for the idea, doing the utmost for his motherland.
Today’s twenty-something Russians are the first generation in the country’s post-communist history to have grown up free. Their twenties are the age of freedom, of fast-changing events and intense emotions. Perhaps only at this age they can live a whole life in one day. A young girl and her two accident companions walk halfway around St.-Petersburg; they flirt and tease each other, and for ninety minutes they act out a real-time romantic drama. This stroll is full of laughter and tears against a backdrop of the hustle and bustle of the streets.
This film is of interest primarily because it contains within it the entire surviving footage of an unfinished 1974 film by the same director, Slave of Love, which was successfully remade shortly thereafter by another director, Nikita Mikhalkov.The "cover" story is about a woman (Jeanne Moreau) newly released from prison camps in the 1940s back into Russian society, who finds that there is no place for her in the world she has come back to. However, this painterly film is so filled with striking and surreal imagery that it would be misleading to say that the story is of any great importance in relation to that.
In a poor provincial town, the ragamuffin boys are frenziedly drilled for combat, and at nights the local elite, gathered in a pool room, boasts of fictitious biographies, while bands of boys amuse themselves with bloody fights on trashy vacant plots… One of the most vivid staples of the postwar childhood were pigeons. They could be bought, sold or stolen. One day a beautiful white dove appeared over the town. Risking his life, Ivan caught the White. And immediately became the target of the "pigeon" mafia…
Three women’s lives intersect in a small town in Uzbekistan following the Second World War. The first, an old woman trapped in a forced marriage; the second, a schoolteacher intent on imposing progress on the remote region; the third, a young woman determined to build her own house without her husband’s or the state’s approval.
Man Follows Birds is a coming-of-age story of a young Uzbek poet surrounded by violence. Farouk is fascinated by trees and Khamraev films him with a lot of melancholy and tenderness. Cast apart because he’s poor and his father’s drunk, Farouk is not happy in his village. When his father dies, he decides to go in the mountains with his best friends. Looking for nature at its purest, the two teenage boys have to deal with the cruelty of violent barbarians. Their trip will also make them meet a lost orphan girl and a wise beggar.