The Swimmer

1837: Another year of the grueling Caucasian war. A young officer, Grigory Pechorin, was sent into exile to the active army for participating in a duel. Here in the Caucasus, Pechorin will have to become an unwitting participant in rapidly unfolding events - a fight with smugglers, the abduction of a young Circassian princess, another duel. And when the whole world turns against Pechorin, and a close friend falls by his hand, he will continue his journey alone, a hero, a product of the new age...

Tadeoz Toroshelidze is the most reknowned wine drinker in the whole area. Once he even won a drinking horn in a competition that has rested in his house ever since.

Vocal Parallels is a surreal, impressionistic concert of classical opera pieces performed by several retired Soviet opera divas: Roza Dzhamanova, Araksiia Davtian, Bibigul’ Tulegenova, and the late Erik Salim-Meriuert (Kurmangaliev), a fantastic countertenor.

Set in the ground zero of gangster globalism and driven by a truly manic energy, Generation P is at once a comedy, a tragedy and a fantasy about the rise of a poet-turned-adman through Russia’s nascent advertising business during the Moscow roaring 1990s.

The unborn child of Mamlakat is telling her story. She is 17, beautiful and vivacious, and dreaming secretly of becoming an actress. She lives with her father and brother in a small village in Central Asia. One night she is seduced by an actor from a travelling troupe, who poses as a friend of Tom Cruise, and gets her pregnant. She tries to abort, but her father and brother become determined to find the seducer, setting in motion a cascade of comic adventures.

Gogia brings home a kvevri (georgian wine vessel) made in Imereti in Kakheti . Kvevri brought from a distance with a sledgehammer breaks carelessly. Gogia takes craftsman Abesalom home, who repairs the kvevri, but he himself will get stuck inside of it .

A young woman's passion has a remarkable effect on a Russian village in this comedy-drama with fantasy elements. Sybill is a teenager who is sent to a small town in the country to spend the summer with her aunt. Despite her tender age, Sybill is ripe and sexually aware, and while the initial object of her attention is Alexander, a widower in his early 40s, she instead pairs up with Mickey, Alexander's teenage son. Mickey quickly becomes infatuated with Sybill and is more than happy to indulge her fondness for outdoor lovemaking. Between Sybill's carefree, youthful sensuality and the appearance of Emmanuelle at the local movie house, suddenly love and lust are in bloom all over town.

The whole world of a young girl Sasha is changing after she meets Sun - a hippie leader.

A mockumentary mixing actual private footage of Stalin with reconstructed dramatic sequences featuring doubles.

The war is over, but instead of happiness and joy Alexei Ivanov feels bitterness and fear. We have to go home, but do his children remember him, whom he left as kids?

The film tells a strange story, in flashback, about a British Telegraph Company’s engineer named Hughes appearing in a distant Guria village. Falling in love with the beautiful Anna, the Englishman became the enemy of her brother, Bolshevik Nestor. Both Hughes and Nestor were shot dead by Lavrenty Mgeladze, who had once had everything, but later was dispossessed and driven out of the village. The old Anna told that story to a young composer who recorded the music: “My dear homeland, why are you weeping?…”

With a brother dedicated to punk rock stardom at any cost and a drunken father who chases skirt between robotic dancing lessons from the TV, young Senka stands as much chance of nurture as the hero of Truffaut's 400 Blows. The amazing thing about Ogorodnikov's film is that it was made in Russia. Clearly, plenty of Soviet teenies share the nihilistic feelings of their Western counterparts, and the extensive footage of safety-pin chic at concerts perhaps points to a sound export instinct on the director's part. Senka's brother Kostya is under pressure from Howmuch, a very heavy rocker, to steal a synthesiser from the Community Centre, so to protect him Senka steals it himself. The story occupies little more space than the music, but the performances are splendid enough to lodge Senka's predicament in the heart.

When in 1977 these guys came to Moscow from Pyatigorsk, for two they had 160 rubles and a can of cornel jam. And Muscovites contemptuously called them the limit. Years passed, and the brilliant abilities of the young children were realized. Misha became a bank employee, encrypting all documentation on a computer, Ivan - a criminal hacker, which no computer protection could resist. Fulfilling the tasks of mafia structures and penetrating the banking network, Ivan helped customers rob banks, thereby gaining unquestioned authority in the criminal world.

The story of Pascal Ichak, a larger-than-life French traveller, bon vivant, and chef, who falls in love with Georgia and a Georgian princess in the early 1920s. All is well until the arrival of the Red Army of the Caucasus, as the Soviet revolution that has swept Russian comes to Georgia. Told as a flashback from the present, as a French-Georgian man whose mother was Pascal's lover translates his memoirs for Pascal's niece.

18 directors, 18 novels, 18 short stories about Moscow...

In modern-day Moscow, disaffected former journalism student Roman follows a cryptic invitation to join “the elite” and finds himself forcibly transformed into a vampire. But not your typical creature of the night. Thanks to a parasitical worm known as the Tongue, Roman (now called Rama) has become part of a ruling class of vampires who exercise an “anonymous dictatorship” over humans based not on a thirst for blood but the hunger for money. As various instructors school him in the ways of their elite breed, and Rama explores his new supernatural abilities, he begins a tentative relationship with another newly turned vampire, Hera. His desire for more knowledge about this intoxicating new world also leads him into potentially deadly conflict with Mithra, his mentor who becomes his nemesis.