Knights of Heaven

The Mad Prince: Playing XO

Mozart in St. Petersburg

St. Petersburg banter on the topic of Mozart’s stay in present-day St. Petersburg. Mozart loved Salieri very much. Together they messed around in a tavern. However, Mozart never drank with Salieri - he offered his glass to one of his friends. Friends were very unhappy...

A Belle Epoque

Silver Heads

The necrorealist science fiction plot involves a team of scientists attempting to cross a human being with a tree, and a special unit dispatched to hunt down the zombie-like mutants created in a previous, failed experiment

Daddy, Father Frost Is Dead

A biologist, obsessed with the idea of writing a treatise on a new kind of mouse, becomes witness to a number of bizarre and horrific events, from his son's suicide, to the S&M engaged in by respectable middle-aged men, to his own family's psychic morbidity.

Lumberjack

Violence in the snow! One of the most radical shorts ever made behind the iron curtain, a special document of the Necrorealists' art group, in the former USSR. "Lesorub" (Lumberjack) is a reaction full of energy and morbid rage against the rigid rules of socialist realism - Claus Loeser, Gegenbilder

Save and Protect

Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.

Tractor Drivers 2

The remake of the original 1939 "Tractor Drivers"... Same heroes, but totally different times.

The Wooden Room

The protagonist of The Wooden Room is a director of documentaries, who lives with his wife - who is as stoic as he - in an isolated hut in the woods. The director is obsessed by filming marginal events in life. The closer he can get to these events with his camera, the more he becomes involved with them. In the end he falls victim to them. The film, with no dialogue and hardly any sound, is an experimental meditation on the complex, continually-changing relationship between a film-maker and his subject.

The Will

An underground short film from a “necrorealist” Russian filmmaker. The film is about sadomasochism, possessed by the idea of death and self-destruction. Evocative of the silent films from the beginning of the 20th century.

Bipedalism

The main character is crazy about about depicting various anomalies in art. Accidentally he finds a cinematography archive which makes him advance a completely new theory on the reasons why humans became bipedal. Yufit proceeds with the plot by describing a scientist struggling against the epidemic wave of anomalies in the physical and mental world thematically started in his other films. This time the struggle takes place on the background of paleoanthropology, psychoanalysis and modern art. As materials of the Museum of Anthropology and other archives are included in the film, it oversteps the boundary between a feature film and documentary.

The Urine Crazed Corpse Catchers

The demobilized Baltic sea sailor met the injustice of the world around him and committed suicide.

Yetilion

Earth is undergoing abnormal climate warming. In order to protect it's biosphere, scientists are creating a race of humanoid temperature controllers. Some of them disagree with assigned mission. Scientists find a way out: perform a brain transplantation. Finally, Earth climate has restored but the humanoid race is spiraling out of control.

The Members of the "Che-payevs" Society Talking

Vasily Ivanovich once met with his killer… Collectivism, freedom, stupidity, fun - the main principles of the St. Petersburg underground are filmed with the help of a new myth about the heroic Chapai.

Fortitude

A three-minute long insight into the life of completely unusual people – a group of pacifists forced into hiding in the cellar of a ruinous house to escape a war tribunal. The difficulties of war are manly endured by the film’s characters. This film, like most of Yufit’s works, shows his love of 1920’s avant garde cinema, which was considered the highest pinnacle in cinematography. The director believes the art of moving pictures was more heartfelt before sound and colour. “The development of technologies is not a particularly positive thing for human existence,” says Yufit. —Arsenals Film Festival

Suicide Warthogs

About Sado-masochism, suicide and the irrational nature of the human spirit. The irrationality of the human psyche, sadomasochism and suicide are the leitmotifs of this film. The documentary footage of airplanes and pilots – symbols of courage and honour – become an unexpected counterpoint to the main structure of the film. The combination of documentary footage and poetic storytelling with the inclement northern setting reinforce the ascetic atmosphere of Suicide Monsters and give its self-destructive characters a heroic and noble appearance. —arsenals.lv