Alina Rudnitskaya

A brilliant observational documentary filmed at the Civil Registry office in St. Petersburg, where people come to have births, marriages, divorces and deaths registered. 'It’s like a theatre here', one says in the beginning of the film, and it indeed is, the Theater of Life. The young women working in the office have a job that shifts from being verbally attacked and called idiots, to situations where they are subject to flirt, or where they master the happy ceremony of marriage. Faces, joy, sorrow, fun, despair... It’s all very well composed, rhythmical, with atmosphere conveyed, and lives up to what a documentary should be: multilayered and universal. And about Life.

Using the patriotic military celebrations of May 9 as an ongoing and disquieting motif, St. Petersburg–based documentary filmmaker Rudnitskaya introduces several ordinary gay and lesbian couples whose legal rights are increasingly invalidated, and whose very lives are in constant danger in a cultural and political climate that’s turned blatantly, unapologetically homophobic.

At the center of the story is an amateur female choir of the city of Tikhvin. Each of her participants is an ordinary woman who in everyday life is completely unrelated to the scene. One of them is a seller in a store, someone is engaged in garbage collection, and someone does work as a loader to provide shelter and food. But all of them are united by a love of music and a hope for a brighter future. The arrival of the Italian delegation in the city becomes a real glimpse among the gray everyday life of our heroines, and their dreams at that moment seem even more illusory.

On August 9, presidential elections were held in Belarus. The results, according to which Alexander Lukashenko won, were not recognized by 14 countries. Protests and mass detentions of protesters have been taking place in the country for more than two months. Documentary director Maxim Shved, in order to capture the mood of people and their political views, installed cameras in the cars of two taxi drivers, Pavel and Anna. They talk to passengers, and inevitably their dialogues come down to politics.

The action in the film takes place in the Far East, on an uninhabited island called Rikord in the Peter the Great Gulf of the Sea of Japan. The lead character, called Fatei after his father, and his family have their own marine farm where they harvest delicacies from the sea. In amazing images of the underwater world and land-scapes of the Primorsky (Maritime) Territory of the Russian Far East, the film Fatei and the Sea tells the story of a little man whose life is inseparable from the big world around him.

The presidential campaign in Belarus in 2020 did not bode well for surprises. The permanent (since 1994) head of state Alexander Lukashenko went to his sixth term. During this time, an authoritarian political regime was established in the country. None of the real applicants were registered as presidential candidates: some were arrested, others left the country. As a result, the only competitor of the incumbent president was the housewife, the wife of one of the political prisoners, Svetlana Tikhanovskaya.

Documentary following a mobile blood donation team travelling through rural Russia, where people sell their blood to make ends meet.

Three Russian women in their 30s who all seek the same: security, a higher social status and eternal happiness. Not an easy wish to fulfill in today's Russia, where the patriarchy dominates. So our heroines take matters into their own hands and join a course in the art of seducing a man - preferably a rich one. Seven years of recordings paint a sometimes tragicomic picture of gender roles and femininity in Putin's Russia.

In the yard of the XXI century. But even today, people continue to face the bureaucratic system at various levels. From birth to death, he devotes his precious time to walking through the authorities and communicating with representatives of different levels of government. In St. Petersburg, in the Reception of citizens, an official conducts a reception on housing issues. For many who are desperate to achieve a solution to their problem, he is the last hope. All questions are difficult, there are a lot of dissatisfied people, but we need to find a common language with everyone and help solve the problem.

A documentary on women in St. Petersburg who enroll in a program which will help them land millionaire husbands.

The Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station is the most powerful in Russia and the sixth most powerful in the world. It was built during the Soviet Union, from 1963 to 1978 on the Yenisei River in Siberia. In 2009, one of the world's largest man-made disasters occurred at the hydroelectric power station, which claimed the lives of 75 people. It took five years and 40 billion rubles to resume operation of the station. And although the exact cause of the accident has not yet been established, the engineers accused of the accident have been jailed. The accident showed that the Soviet legacy is still firmly in the minds of people, many of whom live in the past and are afraid of the future. The wear and tear of equipment, the backwardness of technology, corruption, a corrupt court, and propaganda based on the cult of "back to the USSR" portend new man-made disasters…

There was a split between men and women in the village. Led by the village teachers, the women turned to religion. And then the Finns came... the film is a cross-section of village life in all its diversity. School, students, Aborigines and missionaries, teacher… Their idea of religion and of themselves is a kind of everyday lessons of modern life.

A confessional documentary about the thoughts of a woman just before her abortion.

The film is about modern young women looking for their happiness.

Every day, the lives of many people are at risk due to a shortage of donated blood. Each of us, going out on the street, falls into a risk zone. In the operating hospitals of the city and the region, surgeons are fighting for someone's life, children are born in maternity hospitals, patients are brought out of critical conditions in intensive care units, and bleeding is stopped. And to become a donor today means to give all these people hope for tomorrow! But, unfortunately, in recent years, the number of donors has sharply decreased, as people are deprived of information and do not know about the need for donated blood. Also, many people are afraid to donate blood, because they are afraid of getting infected during blood donation, someone thinks that blood donation is harmful to health, but someone would like to, but does not know how and where to go.

The film Broken Ties, by independent Russian filmmaker Andrei Loshak, is an unflinching portrayal of families divided by war. It features seven different pairings, whose members speak periodically with Loshak, one-to-one, to explain their points of view. Their conversations extend over the war's first three months, during which time their opinions evidence no change. The film makes no attempt at dialogue -- on the contrary, it is a testimony to the absence of dialogue amidst an unfolding war, and an unsentimental diagnosis of the sickness of a society in which official propaganda proves stronger than even the most intimate family ties.