Yevgeni Petrov

Russian Empire, 1919. By a twist of fate, young idealist Osip Zadunaisky meets an infamous con artist and self-proclaimed Turkish subject Ibrahim Bender. A man of pure thought and aristocratic upbringing, Osip would never have associated with a cunning and unscrupulous swindler, but Bender comes up with an offer Osip cannot refuse. A precious royal relic, a diamond-encrusted golden scepter is hidden somewhere in town; Bender needs a partner on his mission to find it, and offers Osip a share of the profit from selling the treasure. And so begins their joint venture, wrought with comical and dangerous twists and turns, where they have to outsmart and outmaneuver officers of the White Guard as well as the local mafia, who also have their eyes on the scepter. As their quest unfolds, Osip is compelled to learn Bender’s tricks of the trade: charming flattery, delicate deception, soft intimidation... as well as brute force.

To ensure that the viewer guessed in the name of Ilfipetrov that Ilya Ilf and Yevgeny Petrov were separate, the authors collected an impressive evidence base: live testimonies were obtained in Moscow, Odessa, Yaroslavl, Paris, New York; in the exact repetition of the route of "One-storied America", in miraculously preserved family archives.

The film TWELVE CHAIRS linked in a spectacular way the dramaturgy of a treasure hunt and chase with a dense imagery of people and places. It tells both of yesterday and today, the reality of the people in the CIS countries and the universal humanity of our own actions. Large social utopia thus mixes with the individual hope of personal happiness, be it through money or in love.

The ice has broken, gentlemen of the jury! New time requires a new image of the Turkish national Ostap Bender. He still selflessly loves money. As in the days of the NEP, his big blue dream remains white pants and distant Rio de Janeiro. His methods of achieving the goal are still the same - honest taking money from citizens.

The film tells about the life of the Soviet country in the 30s of the twentieth century, based on the feuilletons and notebooks of famous writers Ilya Ilf and Eugene Petrov…

A former aristocrat Ippolit Vorobyaninov leads a miserable life in Soviet Russia. His mother-in-law reveals a secret to him - she hid family diamonds in one of the twelve chairs they once had. Vorobyaninov in cooperation with a young con artist Ostap Bender start a long search for the diamonds.

In 1920s Soviet Russia, a fallen aristocrat, a priest and a con artist search for a treasure of jewels hidden inside one of twelve dining chairs, lost during the revolution.

Mario, a young philanderer, receives 13 antique chairs in a bad state by inheritance and decides to sell off them to get some money. Afterwards he gets to know that one of them contains documents worth a lot of money. So he begins an adventurous trip to regain possession of the chair. On the way he meets many strange people who would like to help or to swindle him.

A crook named Ostap Bender, who survived a murder attempt by Kisa Vorobyaninov in "12 Chairs," now schemes to extort 1 million from an underground millionaire.

When her country is taken over by socialist revolutionaries, a wealthy woman can't bear to give up all of her wealth and possessions to the new government, so she hides all of her treasures in the 12 chairs of a dining-room set. After her death her nephew finds out what she had done and, since the chairs had been "nationalized" and are now in the possession of a dozen different people, he sets out to track them down and get the treasures he believes rightfully belong to him.

Filip Palm works as a clerk. His hobby is creating inventions of different sorts. He has just received a big inheritance and has fallen in love with Gun Svärdsjö.

The ringmaster of a flea circus inherits a fortune...if he can find which chair it's hidden in.

A musical romantic comedy set in Soviet Union during the first years of WWII.

Anton Ivanovich Voronov is a highly respected professor at the Moscow Conservatoire, who places the music of Bach above everything else and regards it as the ultimate yardstick by which other musical accomplishments must be measured. His daughter, Serafima, is an aspiring singer with great potential, and her father’s anger is aroused when she begins singing in the operetta composed by Aleksei Mukhin, thus abandoning what he considers the higher calling of opera. Mukhin’s work, however, demands a high level of ability from his soloist, and Anton Ivanovich is persuaded of the legitimacy of operetta as a musical genre when, in a dream, he is visited by Johann Sebastian Bach himself, who tells him that ‘people need all kinds of music’.

Talented cabbie with aspirations as a singer spends afterhours practicing with an amateur opera company, ignoring his sweetheart, the femme cab dispatcher.

The first movie adaptation of the Russian novel "The Twelve Chairs" by Ilya Ilf and Yevgeniy Petrov. The basic idea from this movie, in which a barber and an antique salesman were searching for money hidden in one of of twelve chairs, was later reused for other official and unofficial adaptions of the book