Vladimir Golovnitsky

Erik is convinced he has a stone for a heart. That’s why he doesn’t mind that his parents have no time for him, or that he is bullied at school, or that he has no real friends. When his family moves to a villa they inherited, he is confronted by Maria whom Erik's parents want to kick out along with her father. Maria refuses to move and promises to make Erik's life a living hell. As a last attempt to defeat Erik, Maria goes to look for her mother who disappeared two years ago. Together they end up on a fantastical journey to the In-Between-World and Erik learns how hard it really is to wear a heart of stone.

Nazi troops massacre 30,000 Jews over a three-day period in September 1941. Babyn Yar ravine in Kyiv, Ukraine.

The Kiev Trial, also known as the ‘Kiev Nuremberg’, took place in January of 1946 in the Soviet Union, and was one of the first post-war trials convicting German Nazis and their collaborators. 15 criminals, guilty of atrocities, which were later identified by the Nuremberg trials as “crimes against humanity”, faced justice in case No.1679 “On the atrocities committed by fascist invaders on the territory of the Ukrainian SSR.” Using unique, previously unseen, archive footage, Sergei Loznitsa reconstructs key moments of the proceedings, including statements of the defendants and testimonies of the witnesses, survivors of Auschwitz and Babi Yar among them. The film lays bare the ‘banality of evil’ and is devastatingly relevant today, as Ukrainian people are once again being subjected to the violence of barbarian invaders.

Is it morally acceptable to use the civilian population as yet another tool for waging war? Is it possible to justify death and destruction for the sake of supposedly lofty ideals? The question remains as pertinent today as it was at the beginning of World War II, and it is becoming increasingly urgent to answer, as countless tragedies have been caused by unethical political decisions.

An unremarkable episode from the life of a Russian aristocrat.

Children are left at grandma's house without their smartphones. Real life seems rather boring until they find instructions for the Kratt - a magical creature who will do whatever its master says. All they have to do now, is to buy a soul from the devil.

A documentary view of the galas of Paris’s Palais Garnier in the 1950s and ’60s.

The enigma of the personality cult is revealed in the grand spectacle of Stalin’s funeral. The film is based on unique archive footage, shot in the USSR on March 5 - 9, 1953, when the country mourned and buried Joseph Stalin.

The city of Vyshny Volochyok: broken roads, snow and fog. The car service station in the suburb of the town where Olya and Vadim live and work, and love each other. Both are well in their thirties, they are simple and serious people, they share the ups and downs in their lives, until a third, superfluous party intrudes: the Internet.

Hardly anyone would have predicted that Žanis Lipke would miraculously become a hero. He was a completely ordinary Latvian blue-collar worker. In order to be able to support his family under wartime conditions, he worked at the German military aviation warehouses and supplemented his income by smuggling at night. This film attempts to answer the question whether Žanis’ courage stems from his adventurous and daring spirit, stubbornness, or a sense of responsibility towards people in need.

Every year, on the 9th of May, people gather in Treptower Park in Berlin. They come dressed in their best outfits or in Soviet military uniform. They carry flags, banners and posters. They lay flowers at the monument to the Soviet soldier; they sing, dance and drink. They celebrate the victory of the Soviet Union over Nazi Germany.The film is a direct reportage from Treptower Park 72 years after the victory.

In 1930 in Moscow, USSR. the Soviet government puts a group of top rank economists and engineers on trial, accusing them of plotting a coup d'état. The charges are fabricated and the punishment, if convicted, is death.

In the historic Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite the cruel war that has been raging since 2014 between the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government, people try to survive in the rotten heart of chaos, where violence disguises itself as peace, propaganda becomes univocal truth and hatred reigns in the name of love.

In the historic Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite the cruel war that has been raging since 2014 between the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government, people try to survive in the rotten heart of chaos, where violence disguises itself as peace, propaganda becomes univocal truth and hatred reigns in the name of love.

In the historic Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, despite the cruel war that has been raging since 2014 between the self-proclaimed People's Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk and the Ukrainian government, people try to survive in the rotten heart of chaos, where violence disguises itself as peace, propaganda becomes univocal truth and hatred reigns in the name of love.

A woman lives in a small village in Russia. One day she receives the parcel she sent to her husband, serving a sentence in prison. Confused and angered, she sets out to find why her package was returned to sender.

After a heavy decision, Anna and Juhan are unable to move on with their lives. They take time off at their friends' fancy summer house and once there, are forced to offer shelter to another couple caught in the storm. The couple assumes that the house belongs to Anna and Juhan and they do nothing to correct the mistake. Instead, they seize their new roles and start taking their mutual bitterness out on the strangers. Pretenders is a psychological drama about the truths and illusions of a relationship.

In August 1991 a failed coup d'état attempt (known as Putsch) led by a group of hard-core communists in Moscow, ended the 70-year-long rule of the Soviets. The USSR collapsed soon after, and the tricolour of the sovereign Russian Federation flew over Kremlin. As president Gorbachev was detained by the coup leaders, state-run TV and radio channels, usurped by the putschists, broadcast Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake" instead of news bulletins, and crowds of protestors gathered around Moscow's White House, preparing to defend the stronghold of democratic opposition led by Boris Yeltsin, in the city of Leningrad thousands of confused, scared, excited and desperate people poured into the streets to become a part of the event, which was supposed to change their destiny. A quarter of a century later, Sergei Loznitsa revisits the dramatic moments of August 1991 and casts an eye on the event which was hailed worldwide as the birth of "Russian democracy".

In Yekaterinburg over the Christmas period, shop assistant Lenka Shabadinova experiences a number of incredible events and unexpected meetings.

Alex glides his mouse tenderly over online images of Vika. He has been smitten ever since he saw her with her friends and cannot get her out of his head. Unfortunately, Vika is beyond Alex’s reach because he's not welcome in her neighborhood. Nonetheless, Alex sneaks into a disco at her school and finds up the courage to ask her to dance. Moments are intense as Alex feels infatuation for the first time.

Film about the order of things: everyone has his own.

By My Side is a poetic meditation on our inability to notice the most important thing in live: love. It is an exploration of our tendency to hide from love and bar it from our lives; to unknowingly push it away, bewildered by our own feelings, even when it appears in the guise of a regular, flesh-and- blood woman. And yet, it always comes back...

A chronicle of the civil uprising against the regime of Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych that took place in Kiev in the winter of 2013/14. The film follows the progress of the revolution: from peaceful rallies, half a million strong in the Maidan square, to the bloody street battles between protesters and riot police.

He's an unemployed guy who earns some money by giving lifts to strangers. She's a graphic designer who just got her first job. The film tracks their relationship - and the way it gradually melts away - throughout a year. A subtle, moving portrait of an immature love that breaks down easily.

A remote village in the Northwest of Russia. A mental asylum is located in an old wooden house. The place and its inhabitants seem to be untouched by civilization. In this pristine setting, no articulate human voice is heard, and pain is muted. The landscapes and buildings are not so much inhabited as lightly entwined and then passed through by their anonymous residents, like some creeping mist. Phantoms half stuck, half undone in a phantom world—lost persons from a lost society?

Western frontiers of the USSR, 1942. The region is under German occupation. A man is wrongly accused of collaboration. Desperate to save his dignity, he faces an impossible moral choice.

It is the word "horde" that had meant, for many countries and nations, bloody raids and being under humilating contribution for centuries - a strange and scary world with its own rules and customs. To be or not to be for Rus (Ruthenia), that is the price of the one-man mission as he is departing to this world to accomplish a feat. The film tells the story of how Saint Alexius, the Metropolitan of Moscow and Wonderworker of All Russia, healed the Tatar Queen Taidula, Jani-Beg's mother, from blindness, in 1357.

In the second feature film by Russian director Vasily Sigarev, fate brings ordeals to characters that find themselves immersed in deep crisis; they must seek the strength to cope with adversity. In a remote and cold region of Russia, Galya, a middle-aged woman with a drinking problem, has been separated from her twin daughters and she wants them back. On the other hand, Grishka and Anton are a young couple who decide to get married, but right after the wedding their relationship is put to the test in a brutal way. While Artyom longs to see his missing father, but his mother objects. There is only one element that brings all of these characters together: misfortune.

In the middle of June the village of Santo Antonio de Mixoes da Serra in the Valdreu region of Northern Portugal honours its Patron Saint with a very special festival. On this day the local farmers bring their animals to the church – cows, horses, dogs, cats, chickens, rabbits – to be blessed. This ancient tradition is passed from generation to generation, and today, just as hundreds of years ago, animals and people flock up the mountain roads to the church square to become a part of the religious festival. The film is about this miracle.

A drug smuggler is betrayed by his partner and is then forced to seek help from Russian mobsters.

Georgy is driving a load of freight into Russia when, after an unpleasant encounter with the police at a border crossing, he finds himself giving a lift to a strange old man with disturbing stories about his younger days in the Army. After next picking up a young woman who works as a prostitute and is wary of the territory, Georgy finds himself lost, and despite asking some homeless men for help, he’s less sure than he was before of how to make his way back where he belongs. As brutal images of violence and alienation cross the screen, Georgy’s odyssey becomes darker and more desperate until it reaches an unexpected conclusion.

Two men at a remote Arctic base begin mistrusting each other after an important radio message.

Just before winter cloaks everything in the Arctic night, a few hours of daylight linger in late autumn in the village of Sumskoy Posad, one thousand kilometres north of Saint Petersburg, in Karelia, on the shores of the White Sea. Linked to the rest of the country by a vague muddy track and a stretch of railway line, the village lives in a suspended and mysterious dimension. This is the Russia of endless forests and potato fields. A few robust and uncompromising characters work calmly there, driven by no vital needs. This is a still happy and cold Russia.

A dying actor asks a doctor to help him commit suicide in return for a masterpiece.

The images comprise only of material Sergei Loznitsa found in the Moscow film archives about the siege of Leningrad during the World War II. By providing the originally silent images with a meticulously reconstructed soundtrack, the scenes from everyday life under siege seem to be set in the present. By not intervening in the montage but giving the scenes room to tell a story, the scenes transcend the specific historic events and lead a new life. They do not evoke memories of the past, but become a breathtaking reanimation of reality.

A group of drop-outs, losers and criminals are travelling in a stolen Mercedes seemingly aimlessly along numerous derelict houses and impassable roads to eventually end up on an old decaying state farm in Crimea, the southern tip of the former Soviet Union, where the mother, wife and daughter of one of them live. The men kill time with smoking, drinking and staring in front of them, but an undercurrent tension is brewing. On the last night they have a party that is equally destructive as their life

Twenty-five films from twenty-five European countries by twenty-five European directors.

Winter. A bus stop in a small village. People are waiting for a bus. They talk. Listening to their conversations, the viewer can imagine the world they live in. United by the movement of the camera, the place and the people blend together.

A few fugitives... And a very, very long way to freedom.

An acknowledged master of the short sans dialogue, Jos Stelling won a bundle of awards for THE WAITING ROOM at festivals in Holland, Russia, and Switzerland. And if you thought that richly inventive spoof of the leering macho in God?s Little Acre, the crowded waiting room of your local railway station, was one of the luniest Erotic Tales ever made, then buckle your seat belt for a ride down Life?s Great Battlefield: the expressway during rush hour! Take the boredom of the slow lane, add the spice of one-upmanship, top it off with a delightful girl-boy butting match, and what?s missing? A layover at the next gas station.

A slow, dialogue-free film about a woman's journey in Siberia.

The atmosphere of a corridor between yesterday and tomorrow, where many doors open into the unknown. A series of faces, gestures and images both real and imagined time. A fragmentary narrative without dialogue depicting several people in Vilnius.