Pavel Kogan

The Hermitage Museum. Visitors gather around a tour guide. “You are standing before Leonardo da Vinci’s painting Madonna Litta. Look at her face: it is beautiful.” A hidden camera studies the faces of the people assembled in the museum with the same “careful, attentive, loving regard for the human being” as da Vinci’s painting itself.

Alisa Freyndlikh in a rush — there isn't a single calm, free minute. Rehearsals, discussions of roles with Igor Vladimirov, her daughter Varya's birthday, daytime and evening performances, meetings with the audience...

The plot is based on a conflict that arose at the architectural design institute.

The art of theater is a complex craft. In 19 minutes, you can’t convey everything that is taught over five years. Our film is only a short walk through the Lunacharsky State Institute of Theatre Arts, a cinematic panorama of three directing classes. The classes of M. O. Knebel, A. A. Goncharov, and A. V. Efros.

Revolt in Sobibor is a beautifully filmed portrait of four survivors of the uprising in the Sobibór extermination camp in Eastern Poland, close to the Russian border.

Everyday life at a sweets factory: a grey, grinding existence. An invited lecturer speaks of fine feelings, of love and courtship, but he does not know what it takes to produce a box of chocolates that someone would bring to a beloved woman on International Women’s Day. Falling snow covers the streets. Then spring comes, followed by summer, but in the smoking room, in rare minutes of rest, the factory workers will keep talking about a life that is passing.

In the postwar years, many photographs and newsreels taken during the Siege were confiscated and destroyed for presenting too “subjective” a view of the events of that time. This film is the result of a long search through the Leningrad archives. Out of thousands of surviving wartime photographs, the director selected four hundred that had never before been used in cinema. The film is a montage of these historical documents, accompanied by the voices of poets Olga Berggolts and Alexander Prokofyev, radio announcer Yuri Levitan, and the sounds of air raid sirens…

This poetic core in youngsters is also touched in Stanukina's less known Your very personal poetry (Свои, совсем особые стихи, 1982), a wonderful film about a poetry class. It is here that one recalls Kogan's admiration of Lyalya's emotional documentary skills. And it is here that one recalls Kosakovsky's depiction of Lyalya as a person of extraordinarily prosperous feelings, sensitive and energetic, childish and female, shrill and quiet. The young poets are marvellously sneaky, respectfully adoring and creatively playing with - maybe even deconstructing - "Aleksandr Sergeevich", Mr. Pushkin, Russia's exclusive trade mark of high culture and literature.

Tells about the everyday life of the military music orchestra. The most difficult thing is to play a parade concert or “defile”. A defile is when military musicians play a march in motion, without straying from a clear marching step, or from the rhythm, without violating the strict musical pattern. For a professional, this is not so difficult to do, but how did an orchestra from a generally ordinary military unit manage to do this?

Portrait of test pilot Alexander Shcherbakov.