Lyudmila Ulitskaya

When you love, your life changes beyond recognition. When you are loved, you may not even suspect it. But if your life turns into a continuous nightmare, if every minute you are waiting for news of the death of another loved one - such love cannot be overlooked. It is only necessary to calculate the lover. And as soon as possible.

A boy wants to learn how to sew buttons, and following his mother's advice, he sews a hundred buttons, transforming his apartment in the process.

It's not good to turn your back on old friends.

Who is the new Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, or Gogol waiting to be discovered by the English-speaking world? Hosted by actor, author, and activist Stephen Fry, focuses on six authors whose vibrant, idiosyncratic work continues to gain traction with a global audience: Dmitry Bykov, Mariam Petrosyan, Zakhar Prilepin, Anna Starobinets, Vladimir Sorokin, and Lyudmila Ultiskaya. With contributions from their literary critics, publishers, and peers, the film features extensive interviews with each author.

Two young, simple-minded twin sisters sewing-motorists from a vocational school, who after the death of their mother live separately from their alcoholic father, are charmed by a modernist painter who is indulgent to them and even introduces them into the circle of his "chosen ones". Serge uses the sisters as models and introduces them to his photographer friends.

Based on the novel by Booker Prize Winner Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party is set in August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?