For nearly twenty years now one small Estonian town has organised a Ukrainian-themed fair, during which a beauty contest is held. This observational film explores whether beauty can be an object of competition, and how we should understand the phenomenon of beauty contests in the modern day.

In the Voronezh village of Kuchugury, in the Nizhnedevitsky district, on the very border with the Kursk region, Vladimir Gerchikov is filming a documentary series about local residents whose worldview combines the myths of the Soviet past and deep peasant wisdom in the most bizarre way. The chronicle of Kuchugur includes 25 episodes, in which it shows the naked truth about the modern village, immersed in impassable mud, thinking aloud about Gorbachev and Yeltsin, interpreting current events as they understand them.

A journey by rail where workers reflect upon opportunity and regret, floating through a Eurasian expanse striving to fill their days and dreams, as much as their pockets.

Children answer the question, what is Russia. A difficult question, interesting and unconstrained answers, forming a kind of letter to future descendants.

Welcome to the only country in Europe you probably never heard of! Transnistria is a thin strip of land between the Moldovan river Dniestr and the Ukranian border. After claiming independence in 1990, and breaking free from Moldova in 1992, the country is not recognized by the UN, but has its own parliament, government, military, police and currency. In Transnistria, the old Sovietic virtues are still nurtured in full scale. It´s still USSR-time! «Good morning Transnistria» is a portrait of the country through the life of Oxana and Victor. Oxana is a naïve and optimistic teacher, Victor is a tombstone dealer and regime opponent. Through their lives, we discover what everyday life is like in this akward place, right in the nucleus between Europe and Asia.

Mother and son grow closer, silence melts into words, and life springs between them. The son leaves, and winter settles in to the forever-outdated house in which temporalities blurs and past and present beat to the rhythm of the same clock.

Just a few kilometres east from the European Union border, right between Moldova and Ukraine, lies Pridniestrovian Moldovan Republic /PMR/. Thin strip of a land on the left bank of the Nistru river with 518 000 citizens isn´t recognized by any other country. On this officially non-existing territory has never been shot a professional film. Framed by the time of presidential election, “Fortress” focuses on a couple of characters being stuck in this geo-political gap, in between European Union and Russia, in between capitalist present and soviet past, crime and decency, decadence and hope for change.

Most of the people know Oxana, a trans woman from Chisinau, as a man. Fearing complete rejection from society, she is forced to lead a double life. When her cross-dressing friend was invited to DJ at a local queer party, Oxana decided to attend the event for the first time.

A group of men set out across the frozen Eastern Siberian Sea and after a short journey arrive at an abandoned meteorological station on Chetyr Island. A few people remain, hunting and talking. The memories of the people in the snow-covered landscape intertwine with those of the abandoned buildings. With these new visitors, the place where time stood still comes alive again during the film. When the men leave the station, it remains the same in its snowy immobility, while the audience has experienced both its present and past. The film is a portrait of the land, its history and human contact with it.

The story of a family that left a successful life in Moscow and arrived in an Artsakh village. The head of the family is Armenian, his wife is Russian, and his daughter still remembers life in Russia, but she speaks more and more about the Armenian nature and the importance of life on the land of her ancestors.

Stalin grasps a pencil in his hand as he prepares to draw a line on a map of the Soviet Union. Where the graphite touches paper, some 80,000 people – almost all of them gulag inmates – will build a railroad in the grueling conditions of the polar taiga. It is a railway line of almost no strategic importance, built on permafrost and polar marshes, using limited technology and equipment. For four years, they will slave away, succumbing to exhaustion, illness, cruelty, and solitary confinement before, finally, the death of Stalin himself. In just a few weeks, there will be nothing left of their hectic activity except for empty camp barracks, old locomotives, bits of track, embankments, telegraph wires. All left to slowly return to the taiga…

About the life of four feminists living in Bashkiria and holding completely different views. What are they fighting for? Why are they opposed to each other and to the society in which they live? The film is an occasion to reflect and rethink your experience, regardless of what beliefs you used to follow.

The documentary film about the legendary American publishing house, Ardis. This is a story about books and freedom, and two Americans who changed the history of Russian literature. In the 60s and 70s, Soviet censorship banned ideologically unsound books, prompting literary critics Carl and Ellendea Proffer to confront the issue. From the basement of their Michigan home, they established Ardis Publishing which went on to print the works of Nabokov, Brodsky, Sasha Sokolov, and many others. Through witness accounts and Ellendea herself, the film tells the story of how a small publishing house managed to make banned voices heard not only in the West, but in the Soviet Union itself. With a resurgence of censorship in Russia when the country once again tightens its grip on dissenting voices, this film offers more than just an exploration of the past, it's a lens through which we can understand the present.

Moscow, winter 2021: At TV Rain, the only remaining independent channel, young journalists have been branded “foreign agents”— targeted for surveillance or worse, and required to tag their reporting with a disclaimer that they are serving foreign powers. Regardless: Ksyusha furiously produces and edits stories to distract herself from her fellow-journalist fiancé’s imprisonment; Anya hosts everyday heroes of resistance on her interview show, while shielding both her sanity and her young daughter from the regime’s relentless “fuckery”; Sonya produces the “Hi, You’re a Foreign Agent” podcast at her kitchen table while beholding her empty living room (why buy a sofa when who knows what will happen to her?); Alesya fends off anxiety that her office has been bugged, while hiding her relationship with her girlfriend from her traditional mother. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is just weeks away, as these Gen-Z heroines confront propagandist absurdity and personal endangerment, fighting for the soul of a country they love to the bitter end. An extraordinary historic record and an immersive and intimate inside view of the opposition in an authoritarian society, which becomes all the more globally relevant every day.

A documentary detective story about travel, photography, the search for identity, memory and relationships between people in the modern world. Lada, a Czech traveler, accidentally finds full cassettes of negative film packed in a plastic bag in Sweden. She brings all 22 cassettes home to Prague, submits them to print, and receives 756 captivating shots from a trip of seven Asian men, possibly from China. The film then goes on to tell the story of the search for these unknown tourists, based only on photographs they have lost. The film crew, driven by the desire to return the pictures, investigating the mysterious life of these Asians, reveals the traits of their characters, and with them the nature of modern man.

A daring documentary study of one of the most shocking phenomena of the 21st century, Somali piracy. The film was shot directly in Somalia and contains unique testimonies miraculously obtained by the film crew, reportage shooting, and interviews with presidents and ministers, tribal leaders, simple fishermen and their wives. And with those who were recognized as pirates and imprisoned on a chain, as is customary in Somalia.

Born in Crimea and adopted by a US family in 1993, a young American woman returns to her homeland for the first time in more than 25 years to meet her long-lost family and learn more about her troubled past.

About a father who is not only my parent but also a public figure - a man who shaped the Russian intellectual sphere, supported the annexation of Crimea, and still appears on Russian state television.

The theme of the film is the dialectic of light and darkness and their various manifestations. In 2006, Milan and Tomasz, two Czech electrification experts, traveled to the remote village of Masuku in Zambia to provide electricity to a local hospital building. Four years later, they return there to find out why the system failed and are about to make repairs. While studying faults, they experience a whole series of "short circuits" in the form of a mixture of different worlds, a chaotic fusion of cultures and rituals of all kinds. But Czech guys with "golden hands" are ready to work in any conditions, trying to transfer their technologies and experience to Africans.

The film is a study of drag culture in Russia and the life of Russian drag queens in St. Petersburg compared to similar artists from Western countries, where at one time there was a sexual revolution and they became icons of pop culture. Is travesty an art? What is hidden under the mask of foundation and powder? What brought young people into the drag queen business?