Elderly Woman
When long-time British agent Harry Palmer loses his job because the Cold War is over, he's promptly approached by a Russian bossman, Alex. In St. Petersburg Alex tells Harry of his plan for Russia's future, which is threatened because a deadly biochemical weapon called the Red Death has been stolen from him. He'll pay Harry handsomely to retrieve it. An ex-spy friend tips Harry off that it's being sent to Beijing by train, aboard which we begin to learn whose side everyone's really on.
Mariya Olegovna
Nikolai (played by Sergei Dontsov) has been fired from his job as a music teacher and has to live in the gym until he finds a place to stay. Finally, he gets a communal room in the apartment of Gorokhov (Victor Mikhalkov). The room's previous inhabitant, an old lady, has died a year ago, and yet her cat, Maxi, is still in the locked room, healthy and fat. Soon, Nikolai and his neighbours discover the mystery: there is a window to Paris in the room. That's when the comedy begins - will the Russians be able to cope with the temptation to profit from the discovery?
An adaptation of Flannery O'Connor short stories.
A slice of life among Russian intelligentsia on the eve of WWII. A haunting reminder of Stalin's psychotic purge of 1938 and the nightmarish German siege of Leningrad.
A man tries to come to terms with his father's death and to deal with the mundane details of his burial in a society cut off from spirituality.
About the death of Aleksandr Pushkin, the leading poet and writer of Russia, who was shot on a duel and died when he was 37.
A Soviet film adaptation of Tolstoy's 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich.'
Vasilisa
Boris Pavlovich Raisky, a bored Petersburg aesthet, comes to his family estate in a small town on the Volga. He hoped to find boredom and the faint-hearted provincials there, and did not expect that in the outback he was waiting for real life, dramatic love and serious passions. Boris Raisky’s estate is a blessed corner where everything pleases the eye: a native old house, tender greenery of birches and lindens, a silver strip of the Volga in the distance. And only a mysterious precipice at the end of the garden frightens the inhabitants of the estate. According to legend, at the bottom of it in ancient times, a jealous husband killed his wife and rival. “Precipice” is a symbolic word in the fate of the main character Vera. It fell to her to fall in love with a nihilist and a cynic who preaches "love for a term", painfully choose between feeling and duty, finally, go down to her beloved person in a cliff, cut off everything that connected with her former life...
The Woman in the Crowd of People Seeing Off (uncredited)
Torn by personal guilt, Italian General Umberto Nobile reminisces about his 1928 failed Arctic expedition aboard the airship Italia.
Анна Васильевна
A little girl named Katherine saved one boy's life during the bombing in Leningrad while under the Siege in WWII. The boy cannot speak yet. So she gave him a name Seryozha and provided him with food and care. She was later adopted by the boy's father, who recognized his son.
Wardrobe Mistress
Paris, the middle of the XIX century. Young Marius Petipa is going on a long journey to St. Petersburg, where he is invited to become the first dancer. He doesn't know that his life will develop both happily and dramatically, and his work will be the glory and pride of Russian ballet.
townswoman
It is year 1900 in Pre-Revolutionary Russia and Deacon Olympius begins to take interest in secular literature. When he stumbles upon a book by Tolstoy, he is humbled and inspired to lead a just life. Based on a story by Aleksandr Kuprin.
