Christmas

A girl — or a woman — in a bright red scarf, with a soft toy mouse in her arms. To look at her, you wouldn’t guess that she’s 50 and has been homeless for three years. Her incredible passion to live prevents her from freezing on the cold streets of Moscow.

For generations, the Salamanca community of Mennonites has been living in the same modest and rigidly organized way. Modern-day scenes are accompanied by a voice-over narrating a man’s recollections of his youth. “As soon as I close my eyes,” he explains, “I go back to the past, to the moment when I made the choice that shaped my entire life.” Speaking in the Plautdietsch language, he talks calmly of the strong curiosity he felt as a young boy about the world beyond Salamanca and the Mennonite faith – a curiosity for which he paid dearly.

Documentary film by Ruslan Fedotov

This is ‘a road movie’ encapsulated in the Moscow metro system and filmed over the course of one year: a documentary film that observes cultural and social issues in modern Russia.

A heartbreaking portrait of 16-year-old Ukrainian refugees Andrey and Alisa, who help out at a school for refugee children in Budapest. Andrey asks the children to draw pictures of something from back home in Ukraine. What beautiful things can they recall? He offers the example of his own grandfather’s cherry orchard. The children use confrontational, adult vocabulary to describe their experiences of war. A young boy earnestly goes through a number of battle strategies, and a girl provides a vivid account of a rocket attack.

Sigur Rós have given a dozen film makers the same modest budget and asked them to create whatever comes into their head when they listen to songs from the band's album Valtari. The idea is to bypass the usual artistic approval process and allow people utmost creative freedom. These 16 films are the result. Sad, funny, beautiful and, occasionally, plain bewildering, they represent just some of the available emotional responses to this most contemplative album.

The water flows on the surface of the Earth and in the underworld, this substance connects both sides of the river as margins of life. The narration is holding out the silhouette from the sketch of an artist to the symbolism of the ancient world reading small gestures. This film accommodates artist’s works by giving them a role of an oracle.

For generations, the Salamanca community of Mennonites has been living in the same modest and rigidly organized way. Modern-day scenes are accompanied by a voice-over narrating a man’s recollections of his youth. “As soon as I close my eyes,” he explains, “I go back to the past, to the moment when I made the choice that shaped my entire life.” Speaking in the Plautdietsch language, he talks calmly of the strong curiosity he felt as a young boy about the world beyond Salamanca and the Mennonite faith – a curiosity for which he paid dearly.

Ira, a young woman, guides us through the events that changed the lives of thousands of women like her. Through her eyes, we see the violence that has spread all over Belarus, as Alexander Lukashenko clings to power after disputed and controversial election results. To impersonate this never-ending nightmare, Ira dresses as Mara, a female spirit in Slavic culture who comes to people in their sleep to bring them dreams or nightmares.

On the eve of the World Cup, three teams of young directors embark on a journey through the largest country in the world to find out what really makes up the soul and meaning of real Russian football. In a country where football exists more in the headlines of scandalous tabloids and newly built, shiny stadiums-palaces, in parallel, the invisible life of raw and non-program football, yard boxes and football fields arranged in the most unexpected places is rapidly developing. The blood and energy of this life are young people driven by a pure love of the game, not looking for awards and titles. The stories of 3 heroes who live at a distance of tens of thousands of kilometers from each other, but are passionate about the same thing, are told in a documentary almanac, the shooting of which took place throughout Russia.

"A Hawk as Big as a Horse" follows the daily life of Lydia, a bi-gender ornithologist who lives in Shcherbinka, a remote suburb of Moscow. As Lydia embarks on remaking David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, she decides to create Lara, a life-size silicon doll of her favorite actress.

The picture is about the inexplicable property of a person to fill with energy and life even the most frightening and abandoned places. This is a portrait of the abandoned city of New Idrija and the last years of the lives of those who spent their youth in believing in an alternative version of the “American Dream”.

A documentary musical about life in the Russian outback somewhere near Vologda. It's a sound: music, a human voice, and silence.

About young workers and why they joined the protests - the film by Sasha Kulak, Yulia Vishnevetskaya and Andrei Kiselev "Strike. Minsk Tractor Plant".