Marina Razbezhkina

A talk show

Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.

In the circus tent „Joy” the same thing happens every day – they dismantle and assemble the tent with a dome full of stars, give performances, and move on to the next place. Lynx and parrot trainers quarrel over every little thing, and Valera the clown always performs alone. Until one day a new partner joins him, the clown Yana, and he starts to dream about conquering the world of the circus together with her.

Viktor Ryzhakov takes charge of the Sovremennik theatre after the death of Galina Volchek, who led the troupe for almost half a century and enjoyed absolute authority. For the theatre’s first new production, the new artistic director chooses a play about a family whose members have ceased to understand each other. While working on the play, the director and actors become more and more like the characters in the future production, and find it increasingly difficult to find mutual understanding within their “theatrical family.”

August 2015, a courtroom in Rostov-on-Don. A man is peering through the bars of his cage, his eyes reveal that his nerves are about to snap. Today he will be handed down a sentence to which he must submit: 20 years’ imprisonment in Siberia for terrorism. The man is Oleg Sentsov, a film director and Maidan activist born in Simferopol in the Ukraine. He is charged with leading an anti-Russian terrorist movement and having planned attacks on bridges, power lines and a monument of Lenin. Sentsov defends himself, courageously and without flinching. He responds to the verdict with an emphatic denial of his crimes and instead accuses the accusers themselves ...

It takes 20 minutes on foot to get from the town of Nikola-Lenivets to the village of Zvizzhi. Nikola-Lenivets is the site of Arkhstoyaniye, a most fashionable festival of landscape objects. Zviszhi is the place where Val'ka, Lyudka, Zhen'ka and a sixty-year-old "dolly" Natasha live. Natasha lives with Valerka, a guy who served a term for murder because he knows how to fix electric wires. Valerka prefers to pass his nights with Zhen'ka. Val'ka was once Lyudka's kindergarten teacher; now they spend time together in a vegetable garden drinking denatured alcohol. "Fashionable" festival people and "degraded" Zviszhi people never heard about each other. But one day, village people decide to go visit their neighbors during the festival...

A talk show

Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.

In the circus tent „Joy” the same thing happens every day – they dismantle and assemble the tent with a dome full of stars, give performances, and move on to the next place. Lynx and parrot trainers quarrel over every little thing, and Valera the clown always performs alone. Until one day a new partner joins him, the clown Yana, and he starts to dream about conquering the world of the circus together with her.

Viktor Ryzhakov takes charge of the Sovremennik theatre after the death of Galina Volchek, who led the troupe for almost half a century and enjoyed absolute authority. For the theatre’s first new production, the new artistic director chooses a play about a family whose members have ceased to understand each other. While working on the play, the director and actors become more and more like the characters in the future production, and find it increasingly difficult to find mutual understanding within their “theatrical family.”

It takes 20 minutes on foot to get from the town of Nikola-Lenivets to the village of Zvizzhi. Nikola-Lenivets is the site of Arkhstoyaniye, a most fashionable festival of landscape objects. Zviszhi is the place where Val'ka, Lyudka, Zhen'ka and a sixty-year-old "dolly" Natasha live. Natasha lives with Valerka, a guy who served a term for murder because he knows how to fix electric wires. Valerka prefers to pass his nights with Zhen'ka. Val'ka was once Lyudka's kindergarten teacher; now they spend time together in a vegetable garden drinking denatured alcohol. "Fashionable" festival people and "degraded" Zviszhi people never heard about each other. But one day, village people decide to go visit their neighbors during the festival...

A beautiful portrait of a woman living in a small Russian village after World War II. A piercing meditation on family unity.

A beautiful portrait of a woman living in a small Russian village after World War II. A piercing meditation on family unity.

A group of (mostly) European (mostly) avant-garde jazz musicians embarks on a musical tour across Russia. The plan is to travel 20,000 km, from Moscow to Vladivostok, on a bus. The project is organized and solely handled by Yury, Russian discipline-loving jazz impresario. The film follows the bus and its passengers as they get deeper and deeper into “Russian reality”, bringing their music to people who had never expected to hear it.

Yar is a place that keeps people, and they can't part with it. If they leave, they will die. The only one who wants to escape from the Yar is our main character Karev. But leaving the Yar, he thereby breaks with all traditional values, and unwittingly becomes the cause of the death of people dear to him...

Yar is a place that keeps people, and they can't part with it. If they leave, they will die. The only one who wants to escape from the Yar is our main character Karev. But leaving the Yar, he thereby breaks with all traditional values, and unwittingly becomes the cause of the death of people dear to him...

Two twin brothers. Bright and charismatic. One paints temples, the other writes musicals. And for three years they have not communicated and live in different cities. What has separated them? Different views on life and creativity or love for the same girl?

Ten director graduates from Marina Razbezhkina’s School of Documentary Film and Documentary Theatre lived with a camera for two months in order to chronicle the last “Russian winter” and its popular uprising against Vladimir Putin’s presidential run. People, faces, conversations, protests, failures and triumphs come together to chronicle the campaign.

The film focuses on women from a family living in southern Russia: two sisters, their mother, and grandmother. Every summer, the younger women visit the elders, returning to their roots and embracing a traditional way of life. This household is deeply matriarchal—men are present but play secondary roles. The film’s space is filled with rituals: fortune-telling, herb gathering, and bathing. Here, the sacred is intertwined with the mundane. The daughters follow the life paths of their mother, who once traced the steps of the older women in the family.

SPARTA is the Agricultural Poetized Association for the Development of Labor Activity. This is how the commune calls itself, which has been engaged in the development of the "Theory of Happiness" in the Ukrainian village "Karavan" for more than 20 years. Unable to reconcile with the collapse of communist utopia, the "Spartans" created their own.

My grandmother is 96 years old. She dreamed of becoming a ballerina, and became an engineer. I made this film because I wanted to understand who she really is, but instead I understood a little about myself.

In a small village on the slopes of the former coal mines, Oleg Pavlov, the father of many children, screens the "Little Prince" of Exupery. The camera is the cheapest, bought for retirement. In the roles - Oleg and his four children. Two years of filming and editing - and journalists from all over Russia are on a visit to an amazing creative and friendly family. But the family never calls his father at the table. Children refuse to go to the premiere of the film. And Oleg himself does not go to spend the eldest daughter, when she leaves to live in another city. He just sleeps. And no one wakes him up.

Two different worlds. On the one hand - porters, who bear pianos. On the other hand - people, who the porters visit – musicians, new Russian “middle class”. What is the dialog between them? How does it clear for each of them - what is the musical instrument for?

Nadira 21, and all that she has is a body. Her body. The body seduces, the body works, the body earns. The body lives beautifully. But does Nadir live? Who will win: is she her body or vice versa?

Faced with the relentless demise of the factory they work at, Mikhail, Andrey, Nina, Vladimir, Nadia and Luda – bosses, foremen, engineers and workers at the giant Moscow automobile plant ZIL – cling to their established routines and professional pride to stay upright in a world which is crumbling around them. When an order comes in to produce three of the factory’s legendary hand-made limousines, once the centerpiece of Soviet military parades on Moscow’s Red Square, Mikhail’s team of hand-picked specialists throws itself at the opportunity to show what they are worth.

The last few years, Matthew and Kate live in the village. An event occurs in their lives that leads to a radical redefinition of relationships. The past and the present are intertwined into one confused story in which the characters lose sleep, drive each other out of the house, rush into the arms, starting a new circle. And precisely at this time friends from Berlin come to visit them.

The Chechen Ruslan Arsajev seizes every opportunity to fight against the Russians, including in Ukraine. A portrait of a displaced mercenary from the front line of the crisis.

What is going to happen if the painting of the great Dutch artist suddenly comes to life in a half-abandoned Russian village?

A Russian girl, a Kurdish father. The father lives in Syria, in a town near the Turkish border. The girl joins him to meet her new family and... to find her lost roots. Everything moves forward in fragments, of time and of space. It is not only an aesthetic choice. It is a form consistent with the state of war, with the fragility of existences, with the capturing of reality by the body and by the spirit. But everything moves forward, in its way, carried along by a painful energy that obstinately perforates the borders.

In Russia’s Republic of Tatarstan a city of the future is being built. Named Innopolis, it was officially opened in 2015 and is the first new town to be built in Russia since the collapse of the USSR. The best IT specialists travel there from all over the country to create a new community. But those who work in the town’s service industry are ordinary inhabitants of the neighbouring villages: Pustiye Morkvashi and Vostochnaya Zvezda. What is this juxtaposition like: the new world and the old world? Perhaps, despite the apparent differences, these worlds are identical in their essence?

Carlos has been just born. He is the sweetest of the babies, but his grandmother is very sorry that he’s was born dark skin. Grandfather Sergey Mikhailovich wants to drink to the health of his grandson and celebrate this event, but grandmother doesn’t allows him to drink. Grandfather wants Carlos to know that he was born in the Great Russian Empire. This is Carlos’s first new year, and I made a movie so that he would remember it, and to talk about hilarious and painful things happening in my new family.

The convicts of the female penal-colony Marina, Olya and Albina are waiting to be released. To pass the time they decide to make puppets, sew them and stage a small performance.

Vova Kayukov suffers from a severe form of cerebral palsy. After the death of his mother from cancer, he lives in a psycho-neurological boarding school near St. Petersburg. His life consists, basically, of watching endless TV shows and TV shows, as well as drawing actors and pop stars. For the first time in several years, he went outside the boarding school, looking at the city through the prism of "cops-bandit" serials.

In this documentary, we are not going to discover anything about the eponymous musical genre, but instead we will meet a group of workers dismantling a high-rise building made of concrete and metal. The filmmakers observe and register their labour using ingenious, visually stunning images, sometimes joined into several composition plans.

"Vacation" is a story about a big family, a small town and a strong feeling. The life of a foster family, where there is one mother for five, is strict discipline and established rules. Everything collapses when the eldest daughter's boyfriend comes for the New Year holidays. He is 17 years old, he is eager to become a new member of the family and happily pronounces the word "mother-in-law".

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Can one escape from family to get into a mental hospital? An overdose of drugs – and you are “free”. Now Dasha lies on a hospital bed, paints and smokes. She smokes. And smokes. And smokes... A closed space of the mental hospital is more and more hard to endure. How much is she going to stay in this box? A day of discharge comes. She is going to return back home.

Every evening a group of grandmothers-druzhinnits appears on the outskirts of Kaluga. Almost all of them over eighty. Armed with red armbands and a formidable word, they come out to clean up their neighborhood. To local drunkards to drink in a court yard became much more difficult.

Ivan Komendantov is only 16 years old. But he is already the secretary for ideology of the Stalingrad district committee of the Komsomol of Moscow. Vanya wants to quickly become an adult, so he enthusiastically takes up any business: whether it be the rise of the world economy or a special task to seduce a girl.

The whole life of this village was concentrated in one shop. To the saleswoman Tatiana go for chicken, vodka and medicines; go to learn news, bask, ask for money, complain, celebrate holidays. All roads lead to the "Products".

The son of the village priest is obsessed with the idea of taking a look at the world from his father's belfry. But he can't cope with is fear of the height on his own. His mother helps him. For whom will this ascent become a feat? And what is feat of life, cross or blessing? And what is feat of life, cross or blessing?

True Kazakh girls don’t marry Russians. This is what grandma Zeinegul believes in. But her beloved granddaughter disobeyed her will. Many years later the girl comes back to Kazakhstan. Her mother drinks, her grandma prays, her father got married again, but she wants to take a picture of her whole family, just like the one they took years ago when she was a child. The picture of the family she loves and hates so much.

Ludmila Vasilieva survived the siege of Leningrad in 1944. The 83-year-old publicly condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine while also running for the office of governor of Saint Petersburg, Russia's second largest city. I CHOOSE TO GO provides a glimpse inside her protest against a repressive system

Summer 2010. The entire central part of Russia is engulfed in fires. The authors of the films of the almanac together with the volunteers go to the epicenter of events. Volunteers, foresters, firefighters – they are not heroes in the usual sense of the word, it was just their life, their trouble, and they tried to cope with it as best they could.

Susanna, a sixty-four year old actress, lives with her mother and for a long time hasn’t played in the theatre; only occasionally she appears at small venues with poetic concert programs. But she is haunted by the play, which she rehearsed more than twenty years ago, and which was never staged. She finds a partner; the only thing that remains is to find a theatre that will agree to produce the play.

80-year-old Zinaida Gorshkova, the last resident of the village of Otary, Mari SSR, entertains herself: walking through the forest, she sings songs that her decrepit memory still preserves: Soviet times of collectivization, church songs from childhood. In the songs, in the faces from old photographs, the memory of a past, bygone life is still preserved.

80-year-old Zinaida Gorshkova, the last resident of the village of Otary, Mari SSR, entertains herself: walking through the forest, she sings songs that her decrepit memory still preserves: Soviet times of collectivization, church songs from childhood. In the songs, in the faces from old photographs, the memory of a past, bygone life is still preserved.