The Game

"O. R.U.ZH.I. E "is the abbreviation of the names of friends: O - Oleg, a military pensioner, R - Roman, a scientist, an employee of a research institute, U - Ulyana, a television correspondent, Zh - Zhenya, a physicist, doctor of sciences, I - Igor, entrepreneur, former reporter, husband of Ulyana, E - Egor, laboratory assistant at the provincial research center. Oleg and Roman experience the latest weapons - a rifle with exceptional range and destructive power. The tests are successful, and Oleg is trying to interest the military with these weapons.

Now the peculiarities of the national hunt are investigated during the winter season.

The main character is an intellectual from Russia, who sees it as his duty to bring an idiot from an mental institution to his house. He can pick someone out, after bribing the boss of the institution, with two bottles of vodka. He chooses Vova, at first sight a silly man, and takes him home. His wife is at first not very happy with this choice. Vova says and does nothing at all. Then he becomes an aggressive man, who terrorises the house and bashes everything to pieces. After she is raped by Vova, the wife gets sexually dependant on the Idiot. Vova isn't interested anymore, when she gets pregnant and doesn't keep the baby. The idiot goes now to the intellectual for his sexual needs. The wife can't take this anymore and forces her man to take a choice: Vova out, or she will go.

A group Russian soldiers is send to an outpost to guard the area. They pass the day patroulling the area, while being shot at from the forest. They never know if the civillions are hostile or friendly to them.

Director Andrey Kalistratov is making a multi-part television film about the literary life of Petrograd after the Civil War, about the House of Arts, which was created by the Bolsheviks to control the creative intelligentsia. Modern Petersburg and Petrograd of 1921 are intricately intertwined in the director's mind. The cruel, bloody, but romantic world of the first years of the revolution and the artistic and everyday environment of modern cinema coexist in one space. The main characters of the film that Kalistratov is shooting - the poet and former officer Pyotr Versilov, his girlfriend Olga, the French documentary cameraman Etienne Faberge and his wife Francoise - are as real to the director as the people around him-the film's producer Semyon Mikhailovich, the film crew, actors, friends, acquaintances, relatives. Despite the demands of the producer to be "simpler" and "more economical", Kalistratov wants to make a real historical film, not a standard TV series "soap".

Drawing heavily from Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's 1971 novella 'Piknik na obochine' ('Roadside Picnic') as well as Andrei Tarkovsky's 1979 film adaptation ('Stalker'), 'Tretya planeta' tells the story of a father seeking a cure for his ill daughter by venturing into an area known only as "The Zone" to request help from the mysterious healers that dwell within its forbidden borders.