Lyubov Arkus

With the city in the throes of a flu epidemic, the Petrov family struggles through yet another day in a country where the past is never past, the present is a booze-fueled, icy fever dream of violence and tenderness, and where – beneath layers of the ordinary – things turn out to be extraordinary.

Alla Demidova ranks among the greatest actresses to have graced the Russian-language stage over the past six decades, as well as screens big and small. She's famous for her tragic characters. Perhaps because she, above all, understands the world as a realm of worries and sorrow?

A story of a Moscow's apartment building that is slowly falling apart, literally. First, the hot water has been cut off by an old man from Asia, who could not stand it being wasted. Then the roof is starting to collapse. Finally, the electricity has been cut off. All the tenants of the building, no matter how different they were, find themselves in the same situation.

How is it possible to feel someone elses pain? The hero of this film is an autistic boy. His life is divided between an apartment with peeling walls on the outskirts of a large city, and a mental hospital. Anton comes into the frame when he is on the point of becoming a patient at a residential neuropsychiatric institution, a place where people with the sort of diagnosis that he has do not live long. The author, the camera, the hero. The distance between them shrinks with every passing minute, and the author has to enter the shot and become a character in the story. However, it is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person recognized herself in another. About how there is Another who lives in each of us and must be destroyed every day inside of us in order to survive.

In St. Petersburg, in a house near the Neva, a father and son live. The father does not let go of the video camera. With her help, he keeps his "diaries", taking pictures at home and away, on the streets of the city and while traveling. Among the protagonists of his film are random passers-by, lonely old people, St. Petersburg bohemia, young people, friends and acquaintances of his son, former prisoners of the Mordovian camps. One day, not finding answers to important questions, the father decides to go to Jerusalem. For some time he and his son travel together, then part. In the life of the father, meanwhile, a serious change is coming.

A storry about a friendship between two very different women.

A documentary film dedicated to Alexei Balabanov and his latest film "I also want to".