Elena Laskari
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.
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.
The phrase "Children's hospice" causes many to be taken aback. People try to isolate themselves from extraneous problems, to close themselves off from someone else's grief. One day, fate brought Olga, a successful actress in the past, a mother with many children and a happy wife, to one of these hospices. What could have prompted her to give up her career and start giving all her warmth to other people's children? What inner spiritual motives make people become volunteers and is it so easy to take on someone else's pain?
Shelemishevo, a small village in the Ryazan Oblast. Two girls live together with their grandmother as they have lost their parents – the mother is dead, the father has a new family. One of the sisters is very sick, the other, Natasha, will turn 18 soon. She revisits her old diary and comments on the journaled stories with ease.
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.
The most important ceremony in your life is your funeral. Have you ever thought about how will farewell to you? What will be your coffin, what will you be wearing, will the music sound, and who will accompany you to the final journey? In Novosibirsk crematorium you can already make such a contract.
In recent years, a special "folk craft" has developed in Russia: in-line production of paintings, which are then sold at markets, highways, street vernissages. The film tells about the artel of artists working in this most popular and democratic genre of fine art.
Once upon a time, a stage director with German surname Dell read from Saltykov-Shchedrin that «Skopin is such city where any person has no reason to dwell». So he decided to create a real theatre there, in Ryazan region, in a small provincial town, «where any person has no reason to dwell».
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.
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.
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 ...
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.
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.
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.
