Olga Polevikova

For generations, the Salamanca community of Mennonites has been living in the same modest and rigidly organized way. Modern-day scenes are accompanied by a voice-over narrating a man’s recollections of his youth. “As soon as I close my eyes,” he explains, “I go back to the past, to the moment when I made the choice that shaped my entire life.” Speaking in the Plautdietsch language, he talks calmly of the strong curiosity he felt as a young boy about the world beyond Salamanca and the Mennonite faith – a curiosity for which he paid dearly.

Two friends set off on a journey along the borders of Belarus on Chinese bicycles with gasoline engines. 47 days of travel, endless breakdowns and dozens of random encounters add up to sketches about the life of the outskirts of the most Soviet of all post-Soviet countries. Villagers, students, rappers, drunks. The long road gradually erases the line between reality and cinema, and with each kilometer it becomes more difficult to distinguish one from the other.

"A Hawk as Big as a Horse" follows the daily life of Lydia, a bi-gender ornithologist who lives in Shcherbinka, a remote suburb of Moscow. As Lydia embarks on remaking David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, she decides to create Lara, a life-size silicon doll of her favorite actress.

For generations, the Salamanca community of Mennonites has been living in the same modest and rigidly organized way. Modern-day scenes are accompanied by a voice-over narrating a man’s recollections of his youth. “As soon as I close my eyes,” he explains, “I go back to the past, to the moment when I made the choice that shaped my entire life.” Speaking in the Plautdietsch language, he talks calmly of the strong curiosity he felt as a young boy about the world beyond Salamanca and the Mennonite faith – a curiosity for which he paid dearly.

Two friends set off on a journey along the borders of Belarus on Chinese bicycles with gasoline engines. 47 days of travel, endless breakdowns and dozens of random encounters add up to sketches about the life of the outskirts of the most Soviet of all post-Soviet countries. Villagers, students, rappers, drunks. The long road gradually erases the line between reality and cinema, and with each kilometer it becomes more difficult to distinguish one from the other.

"A Hawk as Big as a Horse" follows the daily life of Lydia, a bi-gender ornithologist who lives in Shcherbinka, a remote suburb of Moscow. As Lydia embarks on remaking David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, she decides to create Lara, a life-size silicon doll of her favorite actress.