Also Directed by Elena Laskari
The film is dedicated to the work of one of the most famous Russian composers, the author of the first Soviet rock opera Alexander Zhurbin. The 4 episodes tell about the different facets of the composer's work, about symphonic music, about musical theater, about cinema, about pop songs. The film is built as a monologue of the protagonist, the shooting was carried out in Moscow, Tashkent, New York, St. Petersburg. The composer's wife, poet and translator Irina Ginzburg, and the son, composer Lev Zhurbin, take part in the film.
Simon Elevich Shnol is a professor, Doctor of Biological Sciences, one of the organizers of the world's first Department of Biophysics at the Faculty of Physics of Moscow State University. An amazing memory and the talent of a storyteller easily unite different episodes of life in time and space. Through the prism of the biography of Simon Elevich, we see a whole era, from the repressions of the 1930s and the devastation of the war years to the revival of the country and the formation of new scientific knowledge.
The stories of great love captured in letters and documents, poems and paintings are also cultural events. In the center of attention are outstanding personalities who have left a mark on culture and have shown with their own lives to what heights a person can rise in his feelings.
Once a large bootlegger factory went bankrupt and turned into a small artel. But people did not become smaller. Valenki for them - not just shoes, it's the meaning and way of life. They understand their need. And they work in difficult physical conditions of work in a collapsing building on old equipment. And they do not regret their life, they rejoice to it ...
On New Year's Eve, the ambulance service and the trauma department of the Torzhok hospital have a lot of work to do. Someone fried cutlets for the festive table and burned himself, someone broke his leg, someone had a sixth birth, and someone just got drunk and fell right under the wheels of a passing car, the daughter beat the old mother, and the man has all the signs of a heart attack, but he refuses to be hospitalized, hoping for a Russian " maybe»... People argue, shout, cry, resist. And only under anesthesia they calm down and fall silent. Anesthesia as a metaphor of modern life, it is as if scattered and in the air. We hear it in the president's congratulatory New Year's speech, and we also calm down... And only the ambulance starts the engine and rushes to the next call.
An ordinary day for an employee of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. However, not quite ordinary, but festive, Police Day. Everyday life of an ordinary department against the backdrop of the speeches of the chiefs and the President's speech dedicated to the Police Day. A separate protagonist of the film is a monument to Lenin.
Little novels from the life of the Leningrad poet Oleg Grigoriev. His fate, like his poems, is a flip-flop, where good and evil exist under the masks of each other.
This 2012 program exploring the relationship between filmmakers Larisa Shepitko and Elem Klimov was broadcast on the Russian television channel Kultura and features interviews with Klimov’s brother, the writer German Klimov, and screenwriter Natalya Ryazantseva.
A film-portrait of the outstanding conductor Vladimir Yurovsky, who led the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the E. Svetlanov State Symphony Orchestra for many years. Now Yurovsky is the general musical director of the Bavarian State Opera and the artistic director of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. A man of the world, open to different cultures, but missing the Moscow winter.
The small town of Kalyazin on the banks of the Volga is famous for its bell tower rising right out of the water. More than half a century ago, during the construction of the Uglich hydroelectric power station, half of the city was flooded. Quiet sleepy streets that go straight into the river make this place really special. Like a mermaid who has climbed ashore, Kalyazin anxiously breathes the half-heartedness of his earthly fate. But every day bread is baked, children are born, women bend over sewing machines, men work behind the machines, asserting the desperate struggle of life where it seems that everything is meaningless and fleeting. Like a river along which large elegant steamboats sail past the bell tower, saying that somewhere there is a completely different life.
