Sergey Vinokurov

The robinsonade of the Polish settler of the XIX century Mikhail Yankovsky in the Far East today directly rhymes with the national project "Far Eastern Hectare". Already 78 thousand people have taken advantage of the unprecedented support of the state and have taken land to dare in the fields of free farming. Twenty–year-old descendant of Mikhail Yankovsky - Egor Bordovsky goes from St. Petersburg to Vladivostok to find himself and master his hectare. Having lost contact with his son, his father also goes to the Far East after Egor.

The action in the film takes place in the Far East, on an uninhabited island called Rikord in the Peter the Great Gulf of the Sea of Japan. The lead character, called Fatei after his father, and his family have their own marine farm where they harvest delicacies from the sea. In amazing images of the underwater world and land-scapes of the Primorsky (Maritime) Territory of the Russian Far East, the film Fatei and the Sea tells the story of a little man whose life is inseparable from the big world around him.

The Sayano-Shushenskaya hydroelectric power station is the most powerful in Russia and the sixth most powerful in the world. It was built during the Soviet Union, from 1963 to 1978 on the Yenisei River in Siberia. In 2009, one of the world's largest man-made disasters occurred at the hydroelectric power station, which claimed the lives of 75 people. It took five years and 40 billion rubles to resume operation of the station. And although the exact cause of the accident has not yet been established, the engineers accused of the accident have been jailed. The accident showed that the Soviet legacy is still firmly in the minds of people, many of whom live in the past and are afraid of the future. The wear and tear of equipment, the backwardness of technology, corruption, a corrupt court, and propaganda based on the cult of "back to the USSR" portend new man-made disasters…

Using the patriotic military celebrations of May 9 as an ongoing and disquieting motif, St. Petersburg–based documentary filmmaker Rudnitskaya introduces several ordinary gay and lesbian couples whose legal rights are increasingly invalidated, and whose very lives are in constant danger in a cultural and political climate that’s turned blatantly, unapologetically homophobic.

Using the patriotic military celebrations of May 9 as an ongoing and disquieting motif, St. Petersburg–based documentary filmmaker Rudnitskaya introduces several ordinary gay and lesbian couples whose legal rights are increasingly invalidated, and whose very lives are in constant danger in a cultural and political climate that’s turned blatantly, unapologetically homophobic.

Documentary following a mobile blood donation team travelling through rural Russia, where people sell their blood to make ends meet.

Documentary following a mobile blood donation team travelling through rural Russia, where people sell their blood to make ends meet.

There was a split between men and women in the village. Led by the village teachers, the women turned to religion. And then the Finns came... the film is a cross-section of village life in all its diversity. School, students, Aborigines and missionaries, teacher… Their idea of religion and of themselves is a kind of everyday lessons of modern life.

A Russian town is terrorized by a monstrous vampire, named Upyr. Upyr turns everyone into a slave, then kills. Even the Russian Mafia boss is killed, and others are in fear, because Upyr cannot be killed by a bullet. Only one fearless man brings hope to people. He sets up a trap for Upyr, by using the Mafia boss's daughter as bait.

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.