Dmitry Vorobyov

Film about the life of a modern Siberian Tatar village on a forgotten stretch of the Silk Road.

2015, a remote village in a remote region of Uzbekistan. Gulchehra earns her living by combing cotton wool. It is hard work, but she has little choice: she needs to support herself and her elderly mother-in-law. Her husband is working in another country and Gulchehra does not realise that he is not coming back. After the death of her mother-in-law, Gulchehra is left alone in a hostile world, where morals and hypocritical morality reign supreme.

Created under a 'manifesto' whose directives would make Lars von Trier shudder, an anthology is presented that might look on paper like an exercise in forced hipness. Fortunately, its creators – Harmony Korine (USA), Alexsei Fedorchenko (Russia) and Jan Kwiecinski (Poland) – prove innovative and just insane enough to make an exhilarating experiment.

In the hunting lodge on the outskirts of one-of-a-kind natural reserve lives game warden, Vasily Klintsov (Igor Lifanov), a young former captain from the special task force. A rich German businessman, in the company of the governor, comes to the nearby small town for hunting. Wild boar hunting is a risky and dangerous business. In addition, as ill luck would have it, a very dangerous criminal escapes from the closely located nearby maximum security penal colony. The hunt should be canceled. But the stakes for the bureaucrats are too high - the 'money bag' is prepared to invest in several large projects. Relying on the traditional Russian blind trust in sheer luck, the governor gives his OK for the hunt.

The protagonist is a teenager who inherited from his grandfather and grandmother a love of land, home, and all life that surrounds him. After his sudden disappearance, mysterious events begin to occur, which only a 12-year-old girl can penetrate into the secret.

Miron Alekseevich, director of a paper and pulp mill, goes to bury his wife Tanya in the place where they once spent their honeymoon. He goes not alone, but with a photographer named Stork, to whom he tells touching details of his life with Tanya. The narrative weaves together the memories of the characters, as well as the rituals and beliefs of the Meri people, a small Finnish tribe that once lived in the Northern Volga region and dissolved among the Russians.

Mischa, a mute boy, sets out on a surrealistic journey together with his father and two men. Their means of transportation is an old Soviet locomotive, loaded with stolen coal. The travellers intend to sell off the loot on their way through the borderless steppes of inner Russia. As a parallel to the main plot, sequences of a mysterious travelling circus keep reappearing in a very suggestive way. Many of the odd artists at the circus are people that the four protagonists encounter in the wilderness along the overgrown railway. All through the movie there is a sensation of magic crossed with pure realism, stressed by the crackling communistic infrastructure and a twisted sense of humor. The border between reality and fantasy is very subtle here. The Railway is a story about strong family ties, but also an ambitious interpretation of the clash between the Russia of old and new. One could call it the rebirth of a long forgotten genre: the Russian wonder story.

This is a collection of portraits: 23 short stories about the Mari women, a sort of Decameron suspended between magic and realism, in which the Autonomous Republic of the Marij El serves as a backdrop for the collective history of a people of ancient tradition. A journey into a mysterious and unknown part of the world.