Poor Liza

Retrospective documentary on the making of the low-budget sci-fi cult classic Liquid Sky (1982).

Top astrophysicist Sasha Greenberg has spent the past 17 years working in the United States. An invitation to speak at a Congress on Cosmology in his native Moscow brings him home for the first time to confront colleagues, and unanswered personal questions. As Russia undergoes perestroika, public and private lives are radically re-assessed and Sasha sees the social and sexual upheavals as a crisis

Invisible aliens in a tiny flying saucer come to Earth looking for heroin. They land on top of a New York apartment inhabited by a drug dealer and her female, androgynous, bisexual nymphomaniac lover, a fashion model. The aliens soon find the human pheromones created in the brain during orgasm preferable to heroin, and the model's casual sex partners begin to disappear. This increasingly bizarre scenario is observed by a lonely woman in the building across the street, a German scientist who is following the aliens, and an equally androgynous, drug-addicted male model.

Made when director Vladislav “Slava” Tsukerman was 21, this award-winning short film – the Soviet Union's first independent short film – tracks the chase for a girl's affection as spring arrives.

At the tender age of sixteen Nadezhda Alliluyev married Joseph Stalin, twenty three years her senior. Throughout their fourteen years of family life, Nadezhda stood by as Stalin transformed from the ordinary revolutionary into the unlimited dictator of Russia - a semi-god, whose portraits replaced Christian orthodox icons in the corners of peasant's huts. One morning she was found dead in her bed, revolver by her side. Up to this day, historians continue the heated debate as to whether she had killed herself or was murdered by Stalin. Tsukerman's film is an attempt to solve the riddles of the not-so-distant past, weaving stories within stories and blending commentary from remaining relatives, friends, and historians with rare archival footage. The film provides a fascinating overview of the early history of the USSR while simultaneously exploring the myriad questions surrounding this complex relationship.