Aleksandr Cherednik

I'll Take Your Pain

After a long prison sentence, former Nazi collaborator Shishkovich returns to the village, guilty of the deaths of his fellow villagers. Ivan, whose sister and mother were killed, cannot calmly accept his return.

The Waiting Room

A 'runaway' homeless man, once a renowned athlete, finds himself marooned in the small, snow-covered town of Zarechensk. Victor lands a job at an orphanage, where he soon meets a young teacher who becomes both a compassionate friend and the love of his life. However, fate doesn't play out simply as good or bad; it unfolds in a way that makes the hero realize one cannot run away from oneself. Consequently, it is in Zarechensk that a train carrying a film crew from the capital, on their way back to Moscow, is compelled to delay their journey for a few days. Remarkably, Zarechensk becomes the place where a director finally discovers the perfect actress for his leading role and encounters a man who has fled from her love. Meanwhile, a producer makes the ultimate decision to select this town as the filming location for her upcoming movie.

Hard to Be a God

A group of scientists is sent to the planet Arkanar to help the local civilization, which is in the Medieval phase of its own history, to find the right path to progress. Their task is a difficult one: they cannot interfere violently and in no case can they kill. The scientist Rumata tries to save the local intellectuals from their punishment and cannot avoid taking a position.

Grace

In Russia, an introverted father and his teenage daughter live on the road in a van that contains their entire life, including the equipment for a travelling cinema: the source of their meager income. Povolotsky builds on the undeniable art of the long take, on both the scale of the imposing landscapes and the tight interior of their cramped vehicle. The nameless father and daughter rove around the extremities of their vast country, from south to north. On its margins, the pulse of independent drifters who endure and resist.

Whispering Pages

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.

Save and Protect

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.

Petersburg

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.

Swan Lake

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.

Svetlana

The short film is based on the ballad of the same name by Vasily Andreevich Zhukovsky. The plot is based on Gottfried Bürger's ballad "Lenora."

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