Hard-Hearted

Returning to Saint Petersburg after a long exile, the dashing Yakovlev, a retired army officer, makes a comfortable living by winning other people's duels. An enigmatic, focused, and extremely skilled professional, he leaves a trail of dead bodies behind him as he swirls through polite society, frequently called upon to wield a pistol as a surrogate in duels at dawn. But when Yakovlev meets the naïve young Prince Tuchov and his beautiful sister, Princess Martha, the normally cold-hearted mercenary is surprised by hitherto undetected emotions. What transpires uncovers a series of revelations about his past and his present self.

Filmed theatre play based on 'Rocco and his brothers"

A mining town in Russia at the end of the nineties. A miners' strike has paralysed the place, corruption and fraud are flourishing in the transitional period from a socialist economy to a market economy. In this world of lost souls lives Yekaterina Artemovna (Katya). This unconspicuous woman has, in the words of her future lover, a "heart of gold". The only bright spots in her lonely life in a meagre communal apartment are literature and her work in the town library. The only bright ray flashed in the life of the heroine is a visiting sailor. But he turns out to be a gigolo and leaves the poor woman. The tense string inside the heroine bursts, the iron nerves lose, and restrained Yekaterina at this point loses all patience with life and ready for the most desperate and cruel revenge...

Following a brawl, Captain Ignat, who is traumatised by the death of his daughter, is ordered together with a regular soldier to find a deserter and bring him back via Moscow to stand before a military court. Although they locate the young soldier, their journey across the wintry moloch that is Moscow is slow and tortuous. Before long, the unlikely trio find themselves drawn into a chaotic maelstrom of violence, corruption, criminality, degradation and squalidness. In the face of the monstrous malaise and everyday horror of life in Russia, the gradual breakdown of the film’s anti-hero becomes a metaphor for Russian society.