Balabanov. Belltower. Requiem

With the city in the throes of a flu epidemic, the Petrov family struggles through yet another day in a country where the past is never past, the present is a booze-fueled, icy fever dream of violence and tenderness, and where – beneath layers of the ordinary – things turn out to be extraordinary.

A story of a Moscow's apartment building that is slowly falling apart, literally. First, the hot water has been cut off by an old man from Asia, who could not stand it being wasted. Then the roof is starting to collapse. Finally, the electricity has been cut off. All the tenants of the building, no matter how different they were, find themselves in the same situation.

A talk show

Tatyana Prokofievna is an ageing woman with a diva’s behavior, but her life is uneventful, ordinary and dull. To escape the everyday slumber she seeks companionship of young men. She provides shelter and becomes involved in their problems. Her ex-boyfriend has married a younger woman. Tatyana is forced to keep her loneliness hidden because of her role as hostess.

This is a poetic film set in the times of Lenin's NEP. A ballet dancer steals a brooch and gives it as a present to another dancer. This is a crime of passion. A mysterious black ball is after the heroine. She runs away from it and manages to give the brooch in an exquisite pirouette movement, as shiny as diamond facets. What gives a stone its dazzling luster are its polished facets. But the real gem is love, and it's much harder to get than any diamond in the world.

A storry about a friendship between two very different women.

How is it possible to feel someone elses pain? The hero of this film is an autistic boy. His life is divided between an apartment with peeling walls on the outskirts of a large city, and a mental hospital. Anton comes into the frame when he is on the point of becoming a patient at a residential neuropsychiatric institution, a place where people with the sort of diagnosis that he has do not live long. The author, the camera, the hero. The distance between them shrinks with every passing minute, and the author has to enter the shot and become a character in the story. However, it is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person recognized herself in another. About how there is Another who lives in each of us and must be destroyed every day inside of us in order to survive.

In St. Petersburg, in a house near the Neva, a father and son live. The father does not let go of the video camera. With her help, he keeps his "diaries", taking pictures at home and away, on the streets of the city and while traveling. Among the protagonists of his film are random passers-by, lonely old people, St. Petersburg bohemia, young people, friends and acquaintances of his son, former prisoners of the Mordovian camps. One day, not finding answers to important questions, the father decides to go to Jerusalem. For some time he and his son travel together, then part. In the life of the father, meanwhile, a serious change is coming.

The authors of the project tried to understand the transformations that the image of the ship underwent in the human mind: a pirate ship of threat was replaced by a romantic ship of love, and a heroic warship turned into a deadly ghost ship. The "lecture" by art historian Arkady Ippolitov is accompanied by fragments from one hundred and thirty films. The original footage of the film was shot by cameraman and documentary film director Pavel Kostomarov. The composer of the painting is Leonid Desyatnikov. The film opens a series of documentaries of the studio "Workshop Session".

Alla Demidova ranks among the greatest actresses to have graced the Russian-language stage over the past six decades, as well as screens big and small. She's famous for her tragic characters. Perhaps because she, above all, understands the world as a realm of worries and sorrow?

To the mental features of Mashenka, Anton Tut Ryadom's student, very low vision is added. And yet, overcoming all these restrictions, she lives. And this is already asceticism. “We have to live,” says the heroine of the film.

Short film created specifically for Auction 2019