Antonin Pankryshev

Masquerade

Taken from a Lermontov play, Sergei Gerasimov's Maskarad (1941) begins when beautiful Nina (Makarova) loses a bracelet during a masked ball. Another woman finds it and without revealing whose bracelet it belongs to, she gives it to an ardent Calvary officer admirer at the ball. This leads to deeper and deeper incisions upon the urbane social body of Tsarist Russia. A drama of pride, marital distrust, gambling, infidelity and humiliation twirls around the decaying corpse of a perverted social class.

Petersburg Nights

A loose Communist adaptation of a Dostoyevsky novel. The serf Egor Efimov, a talented violinist, dreams of true art. Released by his landlord, he goes to the capital. But cold, bureaucratic St. Petersburg quickly destroys his illusions.

And Quiet Flows the Don

The first screen adaptation of an epic Russian novel about a village of Cossacks on the Don River, covering the last days of peace on the riverside before the beginning of the First World War.

Kashtanka

Little dog Kashtanka is stolen, sold, tossed out into the street and saved by a clown. Young Fedyushka gets lost looking for the dog and ends up a prisoner of the sinister Mazamet who compels him to rove from house to house to make money, while Fedyushka’s father wanders through the streets in search of his lost child.

Banda batki Knysha

Silent film set in 1919 during the Russian Civil War. The Red Army liberated a small town, but a unit of White Russians is still operating in the suburbs. A group of Red Army officers are posing as a gang of Batka Knysh to provoke the White Russians before the final blow.

Begstvuyushchiy ostrov

Dress Rehearsal

The film recreates the events of 1905. In the center of the picture is the struggle of the proletariat, led by the Bolshevik party, against tsarism. The demonstration of labor unrest is replaced by episodes of the Russo-Japanese war, Black-Hundred demonstrations, accompanied by a pogrom of Jews, and beating of the intelligentsia. The film paints the attitude of the Mensheviks towards armed insurrection, reproduces the picture of barricade battles, the arrest of the Council of Workers' Deputies and the brutal reprisals of the tsarist autocracy with revolutionaries.

When The Dead Awaken

The movie takes place in one of the Russian provincial cities during the Civil War. A local priest, together with the ex-estate manager buries count's treasures and disguises it as his nephew's funeral. And when his nephew Nikeshka Vonmiglasov, a former Wrangelian, suddenly appears, he understands that he can profit on his magical "resurrection".

They Don’t Give Any Chance to Go

The action takes place in the late 1920s in Ukraine. The exposure of a counter-revolutionary agent who has infiltrated the Soviet scientific community. The film has survived without the 6th part.

Старец Василий Грязнов