Yuriy Arabov
Stalin's reign of terror in Russia during the first half of the 20th century. Described using a combination of historical settings, biographies and masterpieces from Russian avant-garde artists, composers and writers from this totalitarianism period.
The film is a parable about fear; it is a story about the attitudes of a mother and daughter deprived of love, who temporarily find mutual understanding, rallied by fear before the story invented by the mother about a cannibalistic wolf. On a philosophical level it is a reflection on the lost purity of thoughts, which is the main condition for the harmony of human life, and yet another illustration of the proverb: “The sleep of reason produces monsters”
Fantastic story of the first half of the XIX century about a monk named Ivan who must fight the dark forces in his monastery.
Orléans is a typical provincial Russian town on the banks of a salt lake called Yarovoye. The town is 'steeped in evil'. But it isn't some great evil. This evil is of a banal and everyday type: Lida the hairdresser has indiscriminate affairs, followed by numerous abortions; Rudik the doctor enjoys an endless supply of women, thanks to his position, neglecting his paralyzed father who lives with him and hoping the old man will die soon; the local officer of the law has no qualms about committing murder; a magician from the local circus might actually be sawing women in half on stage... One day, a mysterious man appears in this quiet backwater town. He goes by the title of the Executor: at least that's what it says on his business card...
It is the word "horde" that had meant, for many countries and nations, bloody raids and being under humilating contribution for centuries - a strange and scary world with its own rules and customs. To be or not to be for Rus (Ruthenia), that is the price of the one-man mission as he is departing to this world to accomplish a feat. The film tells the story of how Saint Alexius, the Metropolitan of Moscow and Wonderworker of All Russia, healed the Tatar Queen Taidula, Jani-Beg's mother, from blindness, in 1357.
The film is based on real events that took place in Samara in 1956 and known as the "Standing Zoe." During the holiday girl, without waiting her betrothed, removes the icon from the wall and Nicholas begins to dance with her, but suddenly freezes in place. This state continues for many months. Residents of the provincial town are frightened by this extraordinary event, which is cluttered with rumors and speculation. To try to understand the situation, there goes metropolitan newspaper journalist ...
A semi-fictional account of Russian poets Josef Brodsky, who was forced into American exile in 1972.
"The fate of a person can not only be explained, but also predicted, using the same laws according to which a screenplay is built," says Yuri Arabov, a well–known Russian screenwriter, winner of the Cannes Film Festival. One day, an inexplicable, at first glance, event occurred in the fate of Arabov himself. He received a call from a man who claimed that he was his father, who had left him with his mother 40 years ago, and whom Arabov himself had long considered dead…
The Sun (Russian: Сóлнце, Solntse) is a 2005 Russian biographical film depicting Japanese Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) during the final days of World War II. The film is the third drama in director Aleksandr Sokurov's trilogy, which included Taurus about the Soviet Union's Vladimir Lenin and Moloch about Nazi Germany's Adolf Hitler.
The film is dedicated to the little-known period of life of the great Russian composer P.I. Tchaikovsky. He appears before us not as a canonical gray-haired genius, recognized and crowned with world fame, but as a young, insecure man who comes to visit his sister for several summer days. Relatives and friends, “little people”, give the great artist love, care and spiritual support, helping him to find himself, to overcome “torture by the sounding world”. For them, as well as for the authors of the film, Tchaikovsky is an angel thrown to the ground, reminiscent of the ultimate mission of man ...
A slow and poignant story of love and patience told via a dying mother nursed by her devoted son. The simple narrative is a thread woven among the deeply spiritual images of the countryside and cottage.
Via the New York Times: "...a severely obscure meditation on pre-revolutionary Russia in the form of an encounter between a ghost from the past and the ghost's present-day guardian. In fact, the two characters seem to be the shade of Anton Chekhov and the young man who tends a Chekhov museum in the Crimea, though that is never made explicit."
A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality.
Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.
Volodya, who lives with his mother in the apartment on the outskirts of St. Petersburg, gets a pre-revolutionary book on magic rituals of Africa. Reading it, Vladimir realizes that he became an owner the supernatural gift – he can kill people by his own will.
A famous artist strives to find the secret of eternal life through the beautiful mannequins he creates.
This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.
The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I, and in spirit (although not in story) it reflects the play which inspired it, the ferociously antiwar Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. A large group of family and friends have gathered at this country house to dance, drink, and converse. Their conversation, in particular, is adorned with erudite literary references and quotations. Despite their apparent refinement, their preoccupations are simple: sex and violence. Disquieting images break the tranquility of the vacationers' inappropriate idyll: some of these include documentary footage of starving African children, images (both real and re-enacted) of George Bernard Shaw going about his daily life, and a corpse coming to life on an autopsy table, only to cheapen that miracle by scolding a group of women. The music used in the film ironically points to its disturbing message and is uniformly anachronistic.
A young couple find themselves in a ruinous, joyless landscape. The dawn of a new society brings little hope and joy as their hearts are forever scarred by the trauma of yesteryear.
A graduate of the Philology Department of Moscow State University from the 1960s enters into a confrontation with the Albanian dictator and ends up in prison.
