Polina Agureeva

An apolitical rapper from Donetsk volunteers to go to Mariupol to rescue his mother from the besieged city.

Eleven comedic vignettes featuring conversations – some important, some less so – held in restaurants over coffee and cigarettes (how quickly time flies – cigarettes are banned in Russia’s restaurants now). The conversations are candid, and even veer into the territory of murder. In the final credits, the director apologizes to Jim Jarmusch, whose work (in the anthology Coffee and Cigarettes, which Jarmusch shot in pieces over many years) Oldenburg-Svintsov is clearly indebted to. Sex, Coffee, Cigarettes’s kinship with Jarmusch’s film extends to the fact that superstars play tiny roles in almost all of the vignettes.

In November, at the very beginning of the terrible winter of 1941, when the blockade ring closes around Leningrad, a group of young iceboat athletes goes out onto the thin, not yet formed ice. The mission to deliver ammunition turns into an operation to save orphans from an orphanage who were not evacuated in time. Former rivals in regatta sports must now turn into a real united team in order to survive themselves and give hope to everyone else.

Architect Oleg comes to a provincial town on business where he meets a girl Tania. It’s the case of love at first sight and there seems that a long a happy life awaits them…

Ilya stutters a lot, and this interferes with everything - his personal life, communication with the child, work. In desperation, he enrolls in the course of the famous doctor Cherkasova, a guru in his field, whom patients consider a magician and wizard. There he meets new friends and a new love - a young girl Vera. But it turns out that Cherkasova herself likes Ilya, and she intends to win him over.

They saw each other only once. At a wedding with lots of alcohol. Their eyes met and that was it. They didn't understand rationally what happened to them but they felt that they cannot keep living and breathing without each other. Cosmic magnetism with irresistible intensity pulled them together. They no longer belonged to themselves, their families and friends and that's how a tragedy evolves.

Mark Ginzburg is a talented artist who is always depressed. He's 52, but personal and professional success has escaped him. Many years ago, Mark moved from his native Riga to Tel Aviv to get away from his oppressive father, Viktor, who still supports him financially. Victor Ginzburg is a famous conductor. His work is his life. He never cared about Mark's feelings and tried to mold his son in his own image. Their highs and lows turned long ago into a love-hate relationship. More hate than love. Father calls his son by his childhood nickname Birdie, which infuriates the son. Son calls his father Your Majesty, which infuriates the father. After Viktor is diagnosed with a fatal illness, the father and son set off on a difficult journey that leads from hate to love.