Tatyana Ivanova

Alesha Popovich has to catch Tugarin Zmey and bring back the stolen money with the help of a talking Horse (which talks all the time and has an opinion on everything), a wise granny, a donkey and a beauty Lyubava.

Film devoted to director Sergei Parajanov. The film is designed as a confession of the director. There are pictures of various episodes of his life, while shooting, at his home, in prison... The commentary comes in the form of a monologue consisting of excerpts from letters, notes and scripts of his unfinished film The Confession.

When he refused to support power-hungry witch, the good shoemaker's boy, Jacob is transformed into a hunchbacked dwarf with overlong nose. Of their mother no longer recognized, mocked by the people of the city and driven away, Jacob runs one day a goose on the road. Together with the spring animal - in fact the king's daughter Greta enchanted - Jacob is now trying to make the transformation to reverse and put the wicked witch craft.

This is the second installment of a three-part series of autobiographical films about the director's life. The first, which won various awards for its maker, was entitled Zamri Oumi Voskresni and was later retitled Zari, Umri, Vokresni ("Freeze-Die-Come to Life"). At the end of that film, set at the conclusion of World War II, the young Valerka was striving hard to overcome the inertia of just getting by, along with his sometime friend Galiya. In this one, he is adjusting to Galiya's death and is back in school and is living with his mother, a prostitute. After a girl at the school is found to have been gang-raped, the headmaster chooses Valerka to be one of the scapegoats, though he had nothing to do with the deed. The punishment seems mild enough, he was simply expelled from school. However, after quarrelling with his mother about the incident, he takes to the road, and discovers a society so bleak, degraded and hopeless that it is a wonder he remained alive.

This lavish Soviet/Czech co-production is based on Fyodor Dostoyevsky's famous novel, The Gambler, which tells the story of a Russian living in Germany, in a gambling resort. This film is set at the turn of the century, and was filmed in Karlovy Vary (Carlsbad), Czechoslovakia. Played by Nikolai Burlyayev, the gambler succumbs completely to his addiction, using up every resource he has (human, spiritual and financial) in his wagering, finally becoming a rootless drifter.