Armen Petrosyan

Set to readings of Thomas Mann's 'The Magic Mountain', a collage of medical, art and found footage, exploring various medical cases, including reconstructing the damaged human body, the separation of Siamese twins, and Cold War era attempts to create superhumans.

Two childhood friends, and if you're being honest, then two trash with a criminal flavor get into a situation in which long-term friendship is not taken into account. What kind of trash is "trashier", the one who is trying to throw a friend for a certain amount of bucks, and in a very primitive way (they say the money was stolen while he was driving), or the one who, in an effort to return the money, takes the wife and child of his sidekick and companion hostage?

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.

The story about actors who will never agree to betray their theatre, even if they will have to burn themselves. And other instructions on how to behave if a whiskered man breaks into your house and wants you to leave it.

The film comprises three cinematic novellas: (1) “And They Arrived at the Peasant’s Hut… or the Adventures of Writer Senya in Search of the Hidden Word,” in which writer Senya draws inspiration for his rural novels from his housekeeper Yermolayevna’s tales; (2) “The Song, or How the Great Louarsab Organized a Choir,” where a city visitor attempts to form a choir of centenarian elders in a Georgian mountain village; (3) “What Is Our Life?! or What Is Our Life?!”—during a musical reenactment of pre-Revolutionary France, a drunken actor’s tardiness forces King Louis XIV (also the theater committee chairman) and the cast to improvise the play’s ending.