Boris Birman

Beautiful Nina lives happily married, as she saw it, with intelligent Alexandr, professor of Sinology. But the debt for the mortgage begins to disturb the relationship of spouses. One day she meets Sergey, the head of the bank where her husband has debt, and so begins their passionate relationships. The story of the relationship with married Sergey hardly promises happiness, but Nina realizes that for the first time she feels true love.

Maya becomes the target of the Russian mafia after her husband, a successful American businessman, is killed.

In the near future, writer Victor Banev gets himself on a UN commission to investigate the goings-on in the remote town of Tashlinsk, where reports tell of a virus-created race of brainiac mutants. His tween daughter Ira is enrolled at a school for gifted children which has been taken over by the mutants, who have grown to despise ordinary humanity.

In an age of Gladiators, the power that was Rome held its empire together with the might of its armies, the sweat and tears of its conquests, and the cheers and bloodlust of its citizens – glorified in the deadly spectacle of The Arena. Stolen from their homelands, the fiery Druid maiden Bodicia, exotic slave girl Jessemina, and the powerful barbarian Flavius, are pitted against each other as gladiators by the sadistic Roman Governor Timarchus. Banished by Caesar, Timarchus unleashes his frustration on his gladiators, staging extravagant spectacles of combat, orgy and death. In a violent world where only the strong survive, love and hate, life and death, are separated by an instant.

A story of a young boy David who recently moved from Erevan to Leningrad.

Long-nosed Cyrano de Bergerac helps an army officer woo Roxanne, the woman he loves.

Boris Pasternak, creator of the immortal Dr Zhivago, discredited by Stalin and denied the Nobel Literature Prize by Khrushev, Pasternak's Dr Zhivago was banned in the USSR until 1988. Only now in the new spirit of freedom and reconciliation that exists the story of Pasternak can be told. The words of Pasternak are spoken by Robert Powell, with Imogen Stubbs as Lara and Olga.

Fragments of all three short stories retrospectively pass before our eyes. The most difficult thing is not to lose the person who came into your life. Everything can be returned, except the people we lost. Preserving a person is the greatest of arts.