Evgeny Mitta

Today’s twenty-something Russians are the first generation in the country’s post-communist history to have grown up free. Their twenties are the age of freedom, of fast-changing events and intense emotions. Perhaps only at this age they can live a whole life in one day. A young girl and her two accident companions walk halfway around St.-Petersburg; they flirt and tease each other, and for ninety minutes they act out a real-time romantic drama. This stroll is full of laughter and tears against a backdrop of the hustle and bustle of the streets.

A look at the story through the prism of the present. Artists in front of the audience reincarnate in the heroes of the film (the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky; the women he loved and left him; the friends who admired him and backed away from him; the ruthless “Knights of the Revolution” who proclaimed him his banner) and lead the viewer “to” Mayakovsky, forcing him to live his love, creative, and human drama as his own.

Man who talks with a ghost called Black Monk is forced to see a doctor. After the treatment, he loses his ability to communicate with the ghost, becoming angry, violent and utterly unhappy.

Peter the Great takes a Russian man of African heritage - Ibrahim Petrovich Hannibal - under his wing as the tsar builds his grand navy. After having a disastrous affair in France, Ibrahim vows to never fall in love again, until he sees the daughter of a wealthy boyar. Peter the Great insists the two be married, but Ibrahim goes against the tsar's wishes, refusing to force her to marry him since she doesn't consent. When another man tries to marry her, however, Ibrahim's loyalties and generous nature are put to the test.

Sasha is a young girl living in a block flat with her family in Moscow. Once she falls in love with Antonin, a bohemian artist and hard drinker. Their short love affair is pulling her down, to the bottom of her subconscious. Overwhelmed with beautiful and frightening visions, she starts to paint - violently, until she can stand on her feet.

In 1920, just 3 years after the October revolution, the peoples had to decide between conforming to Bolshevism or national self-determination. In that torn-apart-time, one man, the comedian Volodya, tries to mediate, not between different ideologies, but social life and art. While others just want to wash away their gloom, he reflects on the everyday sorrows and the role of art in that time of changes.

The autumn of 1993. In an attempt to puzzle out the death of a famous film director and save the unfinished movie “Boris Godunov” the enamored protagonists fail to notice the moment when they become part of the historical events which will forever change their lives.

Gera, a respected director of TV commercials, thinks he's capable of creating a fiction movie masterpiece. Predictably, he ends up with owning money to a mafia and no film to show for. To make his life even crazier he falls in love with a girl who belongs to the boss of mafia.