The Wolverine's Trail

The 1950s. The head of the steel industry was removed from his position and appointed ambassador to one of the northern countries of Europe. He had enough time to reflect on his life and understand the true reason for his dismissal.

A new chairman arrives at the Zarya collective farm with the firm intention of creating a model farm there. But from the very beginning, his work is complicated by his difficult relationship with the young agronomist Svetlana Nikitina.

Representatives of the Russian nobility gathered at the dacha. A young nobleman Vlas, in love with the mistress of the estate, a simpering poetess, a writer who has long stopped writing, a frivolous wife, her lover and a jealous husband. Their lives are measured and unhurried. They talk about nothing, get bored and quarrel, flirt and have fun… But even passionate romances, which are now and then tied up here, usually end at the same time as the holiday season...

The famous scientist, academician and art critic Andrei Ilyin, who survived with the Hermitage staff the harsh trials of the Leningrad blockade, returned to his hometown after many years. The whole life of Ilyin is connected with Leningrad. A life that in the distant years of World War II would have seemed to have no future, but which, despite the unbearable horror of hunger and devastation, continued only in the name of the future ...

Shakespeare's 17th century masterpiece about the "Melancholy Dane" was given one of its best screen treatments by Soviet director Grigori Kozintsev. Kozintsev's Elsinore was a real castle in Estonia, utilized metaphorically as the "stone prison" of the mind wherein Hamlet must confine himself in order to avenge his father's death. Hamlet himself is portrayed (by Innokenti Smoktunovsky) as the sole sensitive intellectual in a world made up of debauchers and revellers. Several of Kozintsev directorial choices seem deliberately calculated to inflame the purists: Hamlet's delivers his "To be or not to be" soliloquy with his back to the camera, allowing the audience to fill in its own interpretations.

One of the days in a life of a department manager...

Accountant Sergey Ivanovich is retiring. Finally, he will be able to devote all his free time to his family: he will help his daughter Natalya with the housework, raise his granddaughter, visit his sons who live in different cities... But it turns out that adult children do not need parental care, and Sergei Ivanovich feels uneasy at work...

A seminary student on monastery holiday kills an old witch in a remote village. The hag then transforms into a beautiful young woman whose dying wish is for him to watch over her wake for three nights. With terrors occurring and his faith waning, he reads prayers on the overnight watch and tries to survive the supernatural encounters.

A group of Swedish tourists are on the way to a Russian village to witness the so called 'Festivity of Neptunus', in which the inhabitants take a dive in a hole in the ice. This tradition, however, does not exist at all. The inhabitants try to make a good impression by starting the 'tradition' to please the tourists.

A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization, which is in the Medieval phase of its own history, to find the right path to progress. Their task is a difficult one: they cannot interfere violently and in no case can they kill. The scientist Rumata tries to save the local intellectuals from their punishment and cannot avoid taking a position.

The beautiful woman and the brave man disembark the train at the tiny station in the desert. He is the test pilot of the hypersonic nuclear-powered plane called Cyclone, and she is the physicist studying the strange phenomenon encountered by the first flier of the Cyclone jet, named Kazantsev.

The staff of the printing house went to the whole team for mushrooms. As they set out on their way back, they noticed that one woman was missing. Colleagues easily believed that she had left earlier in a passing car, and drove home themselves. In fact, the woman stayed in the forest.

Military doctor General Klenski is arrested in Stalin's Russia in 1953 during an anti-Semitic political campaign accused of being a participant in so-called "doctors' plot".

After leaving the hospital, Sergeant Katsuba, who has bid farewell to frontline service, travels to a provincial town to teach military science to cadets. However, his relationship with the 17-year-old boys does not go well: they consider their instructor to be unfair and overly critical...

Aleksey Klimov, years after the war, cannot forget the girl Marusya, whom he met at the front as a young lieutenant. But then the war separated them. Many years later, having found Marusya, he comes to visit her. They realize that they still love each other. But they have families, and their happiness now can take place only at the cost of the misfortune of loved ones.

Having married a poor girl, the moneylender tries to take out his anger for the injustices he has suffered in life on the helpless orphan, hoping that she will live meekly, constantly begging for his noble soul. However, Anna enters into an irreconcilable moral battle with her husband.