Silver Heads

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

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.

Knights of Heaven

A military group of alpinists are selected to carry out a secret mission. The fate of humanity depends on their success. The rules of the mission require the death of each participant once his or her task is accomplished. After killing one of their colleagues and splitting into several groups, the alpinists continue their journey. But the human unconscious doesn’t follow military orders. Having once committed murder, the “knights” can’t control their desire to kill. They forgot their mission… and kill each other instead. —University of Pittsburgh

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.

NATE!

In the Apocalypse of John, there is such a thing as warmth. Being angry with the Laodicean church, the Lord reproaches: “I know your deeds; you are neither cold nor hot. ” Cold, that is, a sinner who denies or arguing with God, is not hopeless, he can come to salvation through repentance, but a warm, spiritually smoldering person who does not believe in ritual following his heart - such a person is against God. Punk is always a choice of two extremes. Or drink till you drop - or become an invete sober person. Hot or cold. But never warm. The heroes of the film are three generations of Russian punks - from “Automatic Satisfiers” to “Pornofilm”.

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.

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.

Riba

In 2000, Masha Godovannaya curated a programme entitled Avant-Garde Alternatives: An Evolution of American Experimental Film, which went on tour in Russia, making stops in Moscow, St. Petersburg and Yekaterinburg. We visited necro-realist film-maker Yevgeny Yufit at his house beside Lake Seliger, helping him repair the house we stayed in and, in exchange, being lavished with the fresh fish that landed in his nets every day. This film is a tribute to Yufit, who died in St. Petersburg in 2016.