Sergey Yurizditskiy

This is a story of a blind girl who gets a chance of a lifetime. A rich man offers to her the precious gift of the eyesight, provided that she marries him blindly. This gift opens her eyes on the grim truth of life.

Varvara was born in Petersburg at the beginning of the 20th century. And the first wedding she saw was her mother’s wedding. Years passed, the girl grew, matured, the world around changed ... Her generation had to go through many trials - revolution, military communism, NEP, war ... At the weddings that Varvara had a chance to visit, every era and love story was captured in snapshots a life.

A new father could not be more happy about the birth of his first son...until he learns that the baby is not biologically his. In spite of everything, he raises the child as his own.

Egor, a successful thirty-year-old engineer falls in love with Lucy, a flamboyant artist and amateur actress. He clashes with her brother Alex, an “evil genius” photographer, who has dedicated his new exhibition “Sunless City" to St. Petersburg. Egor can't understand the values of the “sunless city”, the fringe world inhabited by Lucy and Alex. After Egor realizes that Lucy is a drug addict, he desperately tries to save her...

The story takes place in a small village on the beach of Sea of Azov at the beginning of 1960s. Adolescents passionately dream of love about which they have heard from their elder experienced friends. 16 year-old Ignat is the first to find out what the real feeling is. His love for an adventuress who pretends to be a singer from capital becomes destructive.

"Poetic documentary about the prominent Russian poet Arseny Tarkovsky (1907/1989), father of director Andrei Tarkovsky. Arseny Tarkovsky translated countless poems from Georgian, Arabic, Armenian, Kyrghyz, Polish etc., but many of his own poems were also translated into other languages. The maker of the documentary, Viatcheslav Amirchanian, cared for Arseny Tarkovsky in the last years of the poet's life, shot many hours of film in that period, took countless photographs and, years later, he combined this with other material to form this documentary. Tarkovsky Sr, who was admired by colleagues such as Joseph Brodsky, Anna Achmatova and Marina Cvetaeva, was never published during the Stalin era, even though he had lost a leg as a soldier at the front. His first book (Before the Snow) only appeared in 1962 during the thaw under Khrushchev." - IFFR

An experimental drama about a boy and his illness, a wife looking for a site for her husband’s construction company and a beautiful girl who works on a phone sex-line.

Isaac Berg is the only Jew in a small town who miraculously survived during the german occupation. The old man is haunted by one idea - he decided to raise the gravestones with which the nazis paved the road and take them to where his loved ones were killed.

Based around the testimonies of four German women, this documentary details the abuse women suffered during after WWII at the hands of the Soviet forces, particularly during their forced labour.

The end of the XVIII century. The reign of Catherine II. In the deep Russian provinces, among the vast steppes of the Ural escaped convict Yemelyan Pugachev proclaimed himself Emperor Peter III of Russia. Under the banner of the Pretender embarked detachments of Cossacks, fugitive serfs, and many spirited people. In these troubled times in the God-forsaken Belogorsk young officer Pyotr Grinyov meets his first love - Masha, the daughter of Captain Mironov. Recklessly passionate love with each other did not want to notice the signs of impending trouble. They did not know that soon they will be an ordeal. They could not imagine how bizarre way their fates intertwined with the fate of the self-proclaimed king, and what an incredible effort will be worth it to save their lives and feelings in the bloody chaos of Russian riot.

Young Kolya is in love with his singing teacher, but his life isn't easy. His father skips town after stealing some coins from a museum and his mother is sent to a labor camp as punishment. When the father returns a year later, Kolya becomes involved with the pretty young woman hired to nurse him.

Closely based on Franz Kafka's book "Das Schloß", the movie shares the same action on a land surveyor who is called to a village to do a job that no one seems to have ordered. Once there, he takes up the struggle against bureaucracy emanating from the castle.

The main character is an intellectual from Russia, who sees it as his duty to bring an idiot from an mental institution to his house. He can pick someone out, after bribing the boss of the institution, with two bottles of vodka. He chooses Vova, at first sight a silly man, and takes him home. His wife is at first not very happy with this choice. Vova says and does nothing at all. Then he becomes an aggressive man, who terrorises the house and bashes everything to pieces. After she is raped by Vova, the wife gets sexually dependant on the Idiot. Vova isn't interested anymore, when she gets pregnant and doesn't keep the baby. The idiot goes now to the intellectual for his sexual needs. The wife can't take this anymore and forces her man to take a choice: Vova out, or she will go.

The film is based on documentary facts and tells the story of an officer in the Japanese General Staff who received the task under the name of Captain Rybnikov to infiltrate the military circles of St.Petersburg. It was exposed after the famous Tsushima battle of 1904, when Japan destroyed the entire Russian Far Eastern fleet.

Based on the Fyodor Dostoevsky novel about a young woman who leaves her family to live with her lover whose father dead set on keeping them apart.

Documentary about Arseniy Tarkovsky, poet and father of Andrei Tarkovsky.

The events of the film take place in a resort area South of the seaside city, beautiful and alien. The heroine of the film - girls orphanage for children with a sick spine, physical energy of the characters looking out in painfully cruel scheme of mutual relations. And finds cruel and unfair to the weaker......

Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.

The manifestation and fireworks on the 1st of May, one of the ritual celebrations of Soviet times, as a gathering of tired participants of a mass scene falling into pieces without the director's orders and without any aims.

Set in the early 1920s after the end of the Russian Civil War, Red Army soldier Nikita returns to his hometown to see his partner Lyuba, both of whom are scarred by the trauma of the Russian Empire of yesteryear.

The action in this lavishly produced film takes place at an oddly ark-shaped mansion during World War I, and in spirit (although not in story) it reflects the play which inspired it, the ferociously antiwar Heartbreak House by George Bernard Shaw. A large group of family and friends have gathered at this country house to dance, drink, and converse. Their conversation, in particular, is adorned with erudite literary references and quotations. Despite their apparent refinement, their preoccupations are simple: sex and violence. Disquieting images break the tranquility of the vacationers' inappropriate idyll: some of these include documentary footage of starving African children, images (both real and re-enacted) of George Bernard Shaw going about his daily life, and a corpse coming to life on an autopsy table, only to cheapen that miracle by scolding a group of women. The music used in the film ironically points to its disturbing message and is uniformly anachronistic.

The script is based on Borges's story "The Gospel according to St. Mark".

This film was Sokurov's first feature at Lenfilm, roughly based on a short story by the contemporary Soviet writer Grigory Baklanov about the transitional period from power to subordinance.