There Is Such a Lad

The village teacher asks the driver Gorlov to take her son, a first-grader, to the city and buy him a school suit. Reluctantly yielding to the woman, the driver will make friends with the boy during the trip. He will change the attitude not only towards this boy, but also towards people in general...

Each of the short stories is based on either one or several stories by a wonderful Russian writer. The heroes are ordinary people “of the people”, contemporaries of Shukshin, all of whose life’s ups and downs are inextricably linked with their country - the Soviet Union of the 60s-70s. The main thing that unites both the works themselves and the films made is a whole gallery of the brightest images and characters, a story about such different destinies and differently meaningful lives, a story in the center of which is invariably Man, with his love, quests, weaknesses and victories.

A film anthology featuring three stories: 1) “The Capron Christmas Tree” - Two men and a city dandy, courting a village girl, return home on New Year’s Eve, with the dandy’s nylon Christmas tree gift offending the men. 2) “A Ticket for the Second Showing” - Timofey, an elderly village swindler, regrets his life and prays to Saint Nicholas for a second chance. 3) “The Version” - A rural braggart recounts his city adventure with a restaurant manager, challenging disbelievers to join him on a repeat trip.

The war is drawing to a close, soldiers demobilized from wounds are returning to their homelands. What awaits them in their native villages?

Agricultural machinery design engineer Mikhail Shcherbakov goes to the countryside instead of taking a vacation. The tractor designed by him does not work in one of the collective farms. Circumstances force him to stay much longer than he expected. Here he meets Klava, who works in the apiary. And far from being on official business, the engineer remains on the collective farm.

A thief named Egor, having served a term in prison, goes to the country to meet his pen-friend Lyuba, a kind genial village woman. Egor comes to love Lyuba sincerely. Now he has friends, work and a beloved woman, he decides to break with his criminal past and start a new life. However, his former criminal associates interfere brutally.

In Berlin, Lieutenant Yartsev's infantry and Tzvetaev's battery fight their way in the U-Bahn. Captain Neustroev's company is selected to hoist the Victory Banner atop the Reichstag.

The film is based on the early autobiographical stories of Vasily Makarovich Shukshin. A bright, emotionally rich movie about the childhood of a boy from a distant Altai village, about his family — his sister and mother, about work, holidays, joys and troubles of ordinary Russian peasants during the Great Patriotic War...

The movie takes place in the late 1930s in the Far East. A group of pioneering surveyors led by Kirill Kostomarov is to lay the route of a railroad through remote taiga areas. To avoid unnecessary expenditure of human labor, Kostomarov proposes his own variant of laying - along the rocks, not along the floodplain of the river, as approved by the project assignment.

In July 1942, in the Second World War, the rearguard of the Russian army protects the bridgehead of the Don River against the German army while the retreating Russian troops cross the bridge. While they move back to the Russian territory through the countryside, the soldiers show their companionship, sentiments, fears and heroism to defend their motherland.

In this the fourth episode, “Battle of Berlin,” the Soviets start their assault on Berlin, and Stalin negotiates with the other Allies.

The story of a man who routinely dodges all responsibility, bemoans fate, spends his days boozing, and refuses to work. The act of playing long-lost father to a pretty teenager spurs him to turn over a new leaf.

Klavdia Vavilova, a Red Army cavalry commissar, is waylaid by an unexpected pregnancy. She stays with a Jewish family to give birth and is softened somewhat by the experience of family life.

Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Georgy Burkov, Leonid Yarmolnik, Galina Polskikh in a sad comedy by Sergey Nikonenko based on Vasily Shukshin’s short stories “Touches on the Portrait”, “The Stubborn One”, “The Strong Go Further”. Nikolai Knyazev works in a TV repair shop. God has blessed him with golden hands and heart, yet the majority of his fellow-town folk think he’s a bit nutty. And for a good reason: he’s constructing a perpetual motion machine, for years has been writing a philosophical treatise, dreaming of world fame and looking down on the other inhabitants of this sinful earth. But no matter how hard he is looking, he can’t see where his happiness (that is, post-office employee Lyuba) lies…

Grusha's husband has left her and she is now a single parent to her adolescent son Vitya. Her brother Nikolay is determined to hook her up with his friend Vladimir. For Grusha and Vladimir to have privacy to build up their relationship, Nikolay decides his nephew Vitya needs to stay out of the way, so he urges Vitya to come live with his family for a while. However, Grusha's not so sure about the arrangement.

The Killers is a 1956 student film by the Soviet and Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky and his fellow students Marika Beiku and Aleksandr Gordon. The film is based on the short story "The Killers" by Ernest Hemingway, written in 1927. It was Tarkovsky's first film, produced when he was a student at the State Institute of Cinematography.