Petr Pavlensky, artist and activist, is in the vanguard of forging social change in Russia. Through an array of courageous performances, he acts as society's conscience in the face of an increasingly totalitarian state. From lying naked in a coil of barbed wire, to nailing his scrotum to the floor of Red Square, his acts of defiance aim to spark debate and catalyse reform.

The battle for Donetsk Airport (May 2014 - January 2015) through the warriors's eyes of both sides. The humans behind the battle. The Donetsk Airport, Ukraine. Rebuilt in 2012, but now a scene of utter devastation - shortly after Russian-backed separatists have taken it over. Weaving together the voices of fighters on both sides supported by battle video, we tell an unvarnished story of war through the eyes of those who were there. The desperate fight for an airport whose capture seems more symbolic than strategic, they also show how human nature can adapt - in sometimes disturbing ways - when one's life is on the line.

Nature and man, space and time, life and death - in the far north of Russia, everything merges together. Somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle, a few dozen people continue to live surrounded by water, stone and sand. Disconnected from the infrastructure and forgotten by the state, these people are forced to deal with their own problems. Their villages are threatened by the fate of many Russian villages - slow, inevitable extinction. Each scene in the film questions the meaning of life and shows a person's life in a place where nature writes the laws.

FESTIVALS - AWARDS & NOMINATIONS

Zürich Film Festival (Switzerland) / Focus Competition - World premiere

German Cinematography Award 2022 (Germany) - Nomination
European Cinematography AWARDS, ECA (Netherlands) - Best Documentary
International Cosmopolitan Film Festival of Tokyo (Japan) - Best Feature Film
IDFF Artdocfest (Latvia) - Jury Special Mention
ORION International Film Festival (Australia) - Best Cinematography
Wisdom Tree International Film Festival (India) - Best Art Documentary
Golden Giraffe International Film Festival (France) - Best Feature Documentary
ARFF Paris - Around Films International Festival (France) - Fest Regards Special Mention

COMPETITION

Achill Island Film Festival (Ireland)
BIFF - Boden International Film Festival (Sweden)
DDIFF - Dingle Distillery International Film Festival (Ireland)
FICMEC - Festival Internacional de Cine, Medioambiental de Canarias (Spain)
Flahertiana (Russia)
FSFF - Fünf Seen Film Festival (Germany)
IFF Arctic Open (Russia)
Jerusalem Anthropological Film Festival (Israel)
MAFF - Matsalu Nature Film Festival (Estonia)
New York Film Week (USA)
Prague International Film Awards (Czech Republic)
Rotterdam Independent Film Festival (Netherlands)
Sacramento Independent Film Festival (USA)
Seattle Filmmaker Awards (USA)
UMFF - Ulju Mountain Film Festival (Southkorea)
Vancouver Independent Film Festival (Canada)
Vancouver Movie Awards (Canada)

On the remote coast of the Russian Arctic, a lonely man spends months in an old hut near the Chukchi Sea, waiting to meet mysterious creatures.

The video of the execution appeared online immediately after the brutal murder of two migrants. Moreover, while the Russian law enforcement agencies showed a strange apathy in the investigation, the Nazis quite frankly took responsibility for it. In this situation, an Israeli director penetrates under the guise of a sympathizer into the darkest nooks and crannies of the fascist underground in order to find and expose the killers. However, the result, the documentary thriller Credit for a Kill, paints an ominous picture: many unsolved hate crimes committed in Russia go unpunished, perhaps precisely because they were committed with the assistance of the authorities.

“To get up, you have to fall down,” the legendary boxer Kostya Tszyu understood this from his own experience. During his career in professional boxing at the time of filming, he suffered one defeat. But it turned out to be more important than all his victories.

Two days after the opening of Timur's grave, on the night of June 22, fascist Germany attacked the Soviet Union without declaring war. Many associated this with the discovery of the tomb of Tamerlane. Panic broke out in Samarkand. The expedition was urgently curtailed, the remains of Timur were sent for research to Moscow.

Russian fairy tale about real people.

The film is based on the real diaries of the former Nord-Ost hostage Irina Fadeyeva, whose 15-year-old son Yaroslav was killed during the assault. These are her reflections on the tragedy that happened and her silent appeal to the Russian authorities, which hide the true cause of the death of the child.

Kursk railway station, cold train. Night road to the city of Pokrov. Colony N2 is located there, where another trial against Navalny is underway. Ilya Yashin goes to see him as a defense witness, who communicates with fellow travelers and talks about prison, about life and about the war.

In the film, experts from different countries not only explain the causes of the famine, they talk about humanity, which erased the boundaries between states and peoples. The Nansen Mission, the American ARA, the English Quakers, and several dozen other organizations, which worked in Soviet Russia at the time, helped people survive, and the Soviet government was grateful for the help. The famine of the 1920s became one of the first symbols of the international struggle for life. Therefore, the film is not only the story of political decisions, it is, first and foremost, the story of humanism, which should not be forgotten.

Filmmaker Vladimir Kozlov observes the sometimes-extreme lengths the residents of Yuri Gagarin's hometown will go to in an attempt to commemorate his legacy.

A unique family lives in the town of Snezhnoye, Donetsk region. The grandson of the once powerful director Himmash, fifteen-year-old Yura Sikanov, extracts coal to feed not only his sisters, but also his mother and stepfather. A heartbreaking story about the survival of children in the conditions of complete indifference of the adult world.

With the assassination in 1948 by state security officers of the head of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, new times begin in the relationship between the Soviet government and Jews. The liquidation of the JAC, the execution of its activists, and the campaign against the "rootless cosmopolitans" form a new state anti-Semitism. The death of Stalin will cancel the massacre, but the former official Russian-Jewish harmony under socialism will no longer be restored. Popularly known superstars have not diminished: Botvinnik is the main chess player, Raikin is the main comedian, Plisetskaya is the main ballerina, Galich and Vysotsky are the main bards, many famous names in various fields, from nuclear physics to light music. But Jews have ceased to be co-authors of Russian communism. And they are no longer allowed into politics, and they themselves are especially actively engaged in "anti-Soviet activities." Without the Jews, the shadow economy is unimaginable, or rather “illegal business”, for which death sentences have been handed down since the early 1960s. And from the middle of the decade, the dissident movement begins to shake the system; the grandchildren of Jewish revolutionaries bring into it the same ardor and fearlessness that their grandfathers did in the overthrow of tsarism. Allowing Jewish emigration in the 1970s makes nationality a means of rejecting socialism and will prove to be a more frequent reason for leaving than the opportunity to reverse one's Russian assimilation. Finally, the collapse of the USSR will put an end to the "Jewish question" in the form in which the last Soviet generations found it.

This film is about people who live in a neighborhood with an ongoing war. There is a constant sublimation of pain in them, they have no choice but to be forced to dwell in hell and drive suffering into the subconscious. The hero of the film is blogger Gennady Gorin from the city of Luhansk. He performs in a variety of artistic genres, from comedy to horror, from drawing to phantasmagoria. It brings reality and dream together. Will the life of a Luhansk video blogger change after meeting with a UFO?

How important it is to be able to see the beautiful in life, even if fate brought you to a remote Bamovsky village. The school librarian teaches children to dream, because this is what distinguishes a person from an animal. For the time being, children laugh at her quirks, but perhaps when they grow up, they will remember her lessons. Henryk contrasts dreams and romance with society's immersion in bestiality. It seems that nothing else can stop the moral decay.

Mark is 18, Kirill is a little over 20. They have known each other for only a month, but it seems they are already best friends. Their interests are girls, dancing, cloud rap and skateboarding. An ordinary evening is dancing on the railing of the Crimean bridge, a fight with a taxi driver or someone in a club, riots in public places. Guys often find themselves in situations where they are in danger, although they usually do without problems. The real break begins when the guys go to the Crimea, but soon a fun vacation turns into a test of their friendship.

One of the most high-profile investigations of the Anti-Corruption Foundation. Investigation of the activities of the sons of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation Yuri Chaika, Igor and Artem, their "business" built on extortion, kickbacks and raiding.

About people on the side of the universe, people with mental disabilities. Mute, frightened, shaking, their whole life is a continuous torment. A film-study about the limits of humanity and humanity. Should we help them or should they help us?

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky is not just one of the founders of world color photography, the author of the first color postcards in the Russian Empire and the publisher of the Amateur Photographer magazine. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, he was the first to realize the exceptional mission of color photography: only photography “in natural colors” will fully preserve the appearance of what can be lost at any moment. The professor set himself the fantastic goal of traveling around and capturing the entire Russian Empire on a camera in order to leave a complete “collection of sights” to posterity. Enlisting the help of the tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky captured thousands of objects on the territory of the entire Russian Empire. The film tells about the fate and professional feat of Prokudin-Gorsky, gives a panorama of the pre-revolutionary empire and portraits of its contemporaries. In the footsteps of Prokudin-Gorsky, the film crew of Leonid Parfyonov visited 12 regions to see for themselves the changes that had taken place in the country. The film was attended by the grandchildren of Prokudin-Gorsky, who live in France, as well as experts from the US Library of Congress.