The governor asks his wife to stage this beloved folk ballet, which should be good PR for his upcoming elections. But it turns out that Swan Lake is also a ballet about two worlds. Trying to fulfill her husband's order, the governor's wife breaks out of the boundaries of the estate, regulated by the world of reconstructions. In the city, she encounters "ordinary people" unknown to her, sleeping swans.
An employee of the insurance company, Oleg Kogy along with his wife Olga, decide to use his official position and swindle an insurance policy. They insure the Oleg's life for a large amount, simultaneously taking out loans in several banks where 'Oleg Kogiya' is known as a representative of the insurance company. But something goes wrong, each of the participants start to get entangled in the sins and merits of crime...
Um grupo de cientistas é enviado ao planeta Arkanar para ajudar a civilização local, que está na fase medieval de sua própria história, a encontrar o caminho certo para o progresso. Sua tarefa é difícil: eles não podem interferir violentamente e em nenhum caso podem matar. O cientista Rumata tenta salvar os intelectuais locais de sua punição e não pode evitar tomar uma posição. Como se a pergunta fosse: o que você faria no lugar de Deus? A declaração do diretor Aleksei queria fazer esse filme toda a sua vida. A estrada era longa. Este não é um filme sobre crueldade, mas sobre amor. Um amor que estava lá, tangível, vivo e que resistiu nas mais difíceis condições.
A poetic essay on the city of St. Petersburg in the 18th century, based on poems by Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Blok and a novel by Andrey Belyi. The film contains reworked footage from Aleksey Batalov's "Overcoat", Eisenstein´s "Strike", Petrov's "Peter The First", Tikhomirov's "The Queen Of Spades" and others. Petersburg is an unbounded visual fantasy where reality and imagination merge into one. The history of the city represented in a digital form may live its independent life. Yevteyeva presents sights of St.Petersburg that have become the genetic code of the Russian culture in a particular manner in her film. Each shot of the film was hand-painted with special strokes.
An anonymous man wanders through decomposing, fog-enshrouded catacombs and encounters a series of “the degraded and the humiliated,” including a holy prostitute and a Kafkaesque bureaucrat.
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.
