Natalya Nikulenko

The House Built on Sand

A slice of life among Russian intelligentsia on the eve of WWII. A haunting reminder of Stalin's psychotic purge of 1938 and the nightmarish German siege of Leningrad.

My Grandmother Fanny Kaplan

1917, the Crimea. Fanny Kaplan is blind and out of prison. She starts an affair with her doctor, Dmitriy Ilyich Ulyanov. which ends unexpectedly when she runs into her first lover: the terrorist who she went to prison for and who is now in the Russian secret police. Soon after, she is accused of an assassination attempt on Dimitry's brother: Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin.

Coma

While detained in one of the Soviet Gulags (prison work camps), Maria fell in love with and had a child by one of the camp guards. However, in order to save her baby, she was manipulated into a situation where she had to betray her lover. The main attraction of this film is the clear depiction it gives of the harsh conditions of life in these infamous camps.

Moloch

In 1942 Bavaria, Eva is alone, when Adolf arrives with Josef, his wife Magda, and Martin to spend a couple of days without politics.

Taurus

Unfolding over two days in 1924, the film depicts the dying Lenin, world revolutionary and father of the USSR, now powerless and isolated at his Gorki estate. Cared for by his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, sister Maniasha, his German doctor and several attendants, Lenin raves about his diminishing faculties, discusses the deaths of great figures (including Marx), rides a car to a picnic in a meadow and ponders his historic legacy.

Russian Ark

A ghost and a French marquis wander through the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, encountering scenes from many different periods of its history.

White Lilacs

From his childhood in Russia to his last days in California, the tumultuous ininerary and bathed in melancholy of the legendary pianist and composer Serguei Rachmaninov. This film is based on the legend that Rachmaninoff received a bouquet of lilacs from an unknown admirer after every performance. He emigrated to the United States, and after an interval, began to receive the mysterious lilacs again.

Ragin

Based on a short story Room number 6 by Chekhov. A doctor taking particular interest in his mental health patients ends up institutionalized himself.