Alexandra Svenskaya

In the old days it was called hypochrondria, or black melancholia. Now, apparently, it's termed the Asthenic Syndrome. Whatever it is, Nikolai, a teacher of epicly indifferent pupils, has got it, and it's not much fun.

A man goes to see his former schoolmate working at a boiler house and persuades him to burn in the furnace the corpse of his communal flat neighbor whom he has just murdered after a quarrel. An orphaned girl gets a job in the archives of the maternity home to find out the identity of her mother who abandoned her years earlier. She finds her, befriends her and takes the first opportunity to throw her into the sea. An old intellectual tries to explain to the neighbor’s five-year-old daughter “all the abomination of her lumpen existence”. The girl feeling hurt for her mother decides to poison the old man with arsenic.

Dasha is thirty, disappointed in men, and wants to bring a child into the world from a very handsome guy with good genes. During the searches, Dasha meets a good fellow, a tv repair specialist. He falls in love with Dasha, but it seems that he does not fully conform to her requirements, so she goes on with her odyssey.

Blonde Lilia and brunette Violetta are fascinated by horse racing, and the young racers are more than a little attracted to them, too. However, the worlds of sporting and romance don't always coexist peacefully as the two girls learn the hard way through a series of touching, surreal, and sometimes heartbreaking encounters. One of the most beautifully photographed Russian films in recent years, this acclaimed modern classic was hailed at numerous film festivals including the Berlin Film Festival and Russia's Kinotavr Festival, where it won the Jury and Critics Prizes. Amazon

The director's story about his life in the Soviet Union before his departure to Israel in 1971. The movie interweaves chronicle-documentary footage and fragments of Mikhail Kalik's films.

A strange man intervenes between ex-spouses on a matter directly related to a large sum of money one of them had secured after selling a piece of property.

This celebrated director's "exquisite cruelty" appears front and center when the death of a stage actor turns a theatrical drama into a real one. Two in One's two parts, "Stagehands" and "Woman of a Lifetime," celebrate the psychological richness that lurks just beneath the surface of banal reality - if murderous stagehands, lascivious fathers and vengeful daughters can be described as banal.

...Her son-in-law, Ippolit Matwejewitch Worobjaninow, is a former nobleman and a dandy who is currently wasting away as a small town magistrate in charge of civil marriages. He eagerly takes up the quest to find the treasure. Meanwhile, over the years, the twelve chairs have been dispersed all over the country. However, Worobjaninow is not the only one in pursuit of the treasure. Hot on its trail are Ostap Bender, a clever and colorful conman, as well as Father Fjodor, a priest to whom the wealthy aristocrat has also confessed her secret. Thus begins a wild chase that ranges from North to South, West to East, across water and land, from the country to the city.