The Hollow

Faced with the relentless demise of the factory they work at, Mikhail, Andrey, Nina, Vladimir, Nadia and Luda – bosses, foremen, engineers and workers at the giant Moscow automobile plant ZIL – cling to their established routines and professional pride to stay upright in a world which is crumbling around them. When an order comes in to produce three of the factory’s legendary hand-made limousines, once the centerpiece of Soviet military parades on Moscow’s Red Square, Mikhail’s team of hand-picked specialists throws itself at the opportunity to show what they are worth.

SPARTA is the Agricultural Poetized Association for the Development of Labor Activity. This is how the commune calls itself, which has been engaged in the development of the "Theory of Happiness" in the Ukrainian village "Karavan" for more than 20 years. Unable to reconcile with the collapse of communist utopia, the "Spartans" created their own.

Twenty-one day is a time period that terminal patients are allowed to stay in hospice. Time is pulsating here according to peculiar inner cycles: getting faster, slower or returning to its ordinary rhythm. We wander through physical and mental spaces: wards, gardens, memories. It is a story of two main protagonists, yet two strangers, for whom the regular talk about death constitutes an integral part of life.

A talk show

A beautiful portrait of a woman living in a small Russian village after World War II. A piercing meditation on family unity.

Susanna, a sixty-four year old actress, lives with her mother and for a long time hasn’t played in the theatre; only occasionally she appears at small venues with poetic concert programs. But she is haunted by the play, which she rehearsed more than twenty years ago, and which was never staged. She finds a partner; the only thing that remains is to find a theatre that will agree to produce the play.

In the circus tent „Joy” the same thing happens every day – they dismantle and assemble the tent with a dome full of stars, give performances, and move on to the next place. Lynx and parrot trainers quarrel over every little thing, and Valera the clown always performs alone. Until one day a new partner joins him, the clown Yana, and he starts to dream about conquering the world of the circus together with her.

A Russian girl, a Kurdish father. The father lives in Syria, in a town near the Turkish border. The girl joins him to meet her new family and... to find her lost roots. Everything moves forward in fragments, of time and of space. It is not only an aesthetic choice. It is a form consistent with the state of war, with the fragility of existences, with the capturing of reality by the body and by the spirit. But everything moves forward, in its way, carried along by a painful energy that obstinately perforates the borders.

It takes 20 minutes on foot to get from the town of Nikola-Lenivets to the village of Zvizzhi. Nikola-Lenivets is the site of Arkhstoyaniye, a most fashionable festival of landscape objects. Zviszhi is the place where Val'ka, Lyudka, Zhen'ka and a sixty-year-old "dolly" Natasha live. Natasha lives with Valerka, a guy who served a term for murder because he knows how to fix electric wires. Valerka prefers to pass his nights with Zhen'ka. Val'ka was once Lyudka's kindergarten teacher; now they spend time together in a vegetable garden drinking denatured alcohol. "Fashionable" festival people and "degraded" Zviszhi people never heard about each other. But one day, village people decide to go visit their neighbors during the festival...

Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.

In this documentary, we are not going to discover anything about the eponymous musical genre, but instead we will meet a group of workers dismantling a high-rise building made of concrete and metal. The filmmakers observe and register their labour using ingenious, visually stunning images, sometimes joined into several composition plans.

A group of (mostly) European (mostly) avant-garde jazz musicians embarks on a musical tour across Russia. The plan is to travel 20,000 km, from Moscow to Vladivostok, on a bus. The project is organized and solely handled by Yury, Russian discipline-loving jazz impresario. The film follows the bus and its passengers as they get deeper and deeper into “Russian reality”, bringing their music to people who had never expected to hear it.

In a small village on the slopes of the former coal mines, Oleg Pavlov, the father of many children, screens the "Little Prince" of Exupery. The camera is the cheapest, bought for retirement. In the roles - Oleg and his four children. Two years of filming and editing - and journalists from all over Russia are on a visit to an amazing creative and friendly family. But the family never calls his father at the table. Children refuse to go to the premiere of the film. And Oleg himself does not go to spend the eldest daughter, when she leaves to live in another city. He just sleeps. And no one wakes him up.

What is going to happen if the painting of the great Dutch artist suddenly comes to life in a half-abandoned Russian village?

Vova Kayukov suffers from a severe form of cerebral palsy. After the death of his mother from cancer, he lives in a psycho-neurological boarding school near St. Petersburg. His life consists, basically, of watching endless TV shows and TV shows, as well as drawing actors and pop stars. For the first time in several years, he went outside the boarding school, looking at the city through the prism of "cops-bandit" serials.

Two different worlds. On the one hand - porters, who bear pianos. On the other hand - people, who the porters visit – musicians, new Russian “middle class”. What is the dialog between them? How does it clear for each of them - what is the musical instrument for?