Sergey Badichkin

Zhenya and Boris are going through a vicious divorce marked by resentment, frustration and recriminations. Already embarking on new lives, each with a new partner, they are impatient to start again, to turn the page – even if it means threatening to abandon their 12-year-old son Alyosha. Until, after witnessing one of their fights, Alyosha disappears.

Day of the Full Moon, a series of vignettes from Russia past and present, summons the spirit of Ophuls’ La Ronde, Altman’s Nashville and Short Cuts, and the time-shifting strategies of Resnais (Mon Oncle d’Amérique) to tell provocative, connected stories illustrating the waltz of years and whim of memory. In 1948, a young man, a boy, and a waiter are captivated during the full moon by a mysterious woman in a lilac dress. The effects of this event ripple across the years, washing over more than 80 characters, including a disc jockey, a fairy princess, a gangster, Alexander Pushkin, and a nostalgic dog. But which of these are dreams, and which reality? Director Shakhnazarov continues his career-long focus on the intersection of past and present with this mysterious, exhilarating mosaic of humankind, which in the end both seduces and satisfies.

The main characters of the film are residents of different places of this country, most common people, with whom most uncommon things, pure wonders, happen. Semyon and Lyuba, a family of fireguards, have a chance to fulfill a dream – to go to Moscow to take part in their favorite TV show “Field of Miracles” (“Pole Chudes”), where they should make a life choice “trophy or money?” An inexperienced officer of Patrol-Guard Service and at the same time an experienced loser Sanya will have to not only survive his first day of service but also to accept his wife’s labors and to reanimate his partner. Four newly acquainted fellows must by any means fly to Moscow in non-flying weather, and a couple of young lovers must reconcile their irreconcilable parents by some mysterious way. Valera has to decide on a dilemma: to save mankind from the Deluge or just to fly with his karaoke-alien-friends in their old UFO? All these things can happen only once a year – on December, 31!

The social ferment in late 19th century Russia which led to the 1917 Russian Revolution is movingly portrayed in this lengthy historical drama, which is very faithful to the 1907 novel The Mother by the celebrated Marxist writer Maxim Gorky (1868-1936). In the story, "the mother" has no other recourse than to watch her decent, kindly husband turn into an animalistic, drunken brute as a result of working in the inhuman conditions of a steel mill in the town of Sormovo. When he begins to express his suppressed rage by beating her, she is defended by her teenaged son Pavel. After his father's death, Pavel is forced to go to work in the same factory. However, Pavel and his friends begin investigating Marxism and socialist thought, and work to organize their fellow workers.

Venice, eighteenth century. The young Rosanna, widowed on her wedding day, discovers that she is the sole heir to an enormous patrimony, becoming in this way the most coveted party of the Serenissima.

This story take place in Moscow during the 1970s and unfolds around the love triangle between two young men and a girl who study at the same university. They argue, make up, and face their first disappointments and victories. While busy with personal lives and loves, they miss foreseeing that the country in which they were born and live will soon disappear from the map.

Three short stories – "Irina", "Mitya", "Seryozha" – are three days from the life of a modern business woman, her adult son and her grandson, whose existence the father and grandmother find out only five years after his birth.

Sochi, Russia. The day before wedding Katya finds her fiancé on a date with a hot blonde, so her classmates Vika, Sveta, and Dasha decide to find Katya a new husband. They have one night only. Will they succeed?