What started as a drama about a Russian police plot to steal a billion dollars from a US financier and to murder his faithful tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, has become a real life investigation of contradicting versions of the crime.
Russian Lessons sees its two filmmaker-protagonists, Olga Konskaya and Andrei Nekrasov, report from different posts on the frontline of the 2008 Russian-Georgian war.
This documentary follows ex-spy Alexander Litvinenko from his forced exile from Russia, to his death from poisoning in November of 2006.
The life of prolific Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev is portrayed through biographical, on-location flashbacks from his birth place intermingled with live concert performances from the historical Kirov (Mariinsky) Symphony Orchestra, St.Petersburg, conducted by internationally acclaimed maestro Valeriy Gergiev. These unique musical sequences give the dramatized episodes from Prokofiev's life a time-transcending significance and actuality in todays ever-changing Russia.
Boris Pasternak, creator of the immortal Dr Zhivago, discredited by Stalin and denied the Nobel Literature Prize by Khrushev, Pasternak's Dr Zhivago was banned in the USSR until 1988. Only now in the new spirit of freedom and reconciliation that exists the story of Pasternak can be told. The words of Pasternak are spoken by Robert Powell, with Imogen Stubbs as Lara and Olga.