Seven people left the small village of Kedrovoe in the Sverdlovsk region for Syria to fight as part of the Wagner PMC. After the battle near Deir ez-Zor on February 7, where the PMC suffered heavy losses, news is expected in Kedrovo.

The film tells about the life and work of Yevgeny Khaldei, who was the famous Soviet photojournalist. He was born on March 10, 1917 in Yuzovka, now Donetsk. The real name of the photographer is Yefim Khaldei. He was called Evgeny at the TASS agency, where he began his career as a 19-year-old boy. He went through the entire Great Patriotic War from Murmansk to Berlin with the legendary Leica camera in his hands. He was fired from TASS in 1948 on the grounds of “the fifth paragraph”. He worked in obscurity, so that that time would not be forgotten. And it seems that he forgave the time everything, the murder of his parents, humiliation and indifference.

Back in 1942, at the height of the Great Patriotic War, a major plague epidemic broke out in Mongolia. A detachment of Soviet specialists was sent to fight it, who worked selflessly, saving people, burning corpses, testing new methods of administering the vaccine, and also falling in love, getting married and having children. 70 years later, their children, now elderly themselves, set off on a journey to Mongolia, following in the footsteps of their parents.

In September 2022, when mobilization was announced in Russia, residents of the Chukotka village of Egvekinot Maxim Teyunaut and Sergei Nechaev decided to escape so that they would not be sent to war in Ukraine. The closest place where you could escape on a small fishing boat was St. Lawrence Island, which belongs to the state of Alaska. In the USA, Teyunaut and Nechaev asked for political asylum. They spent three months in a migration prison. Baptist church pastor Roman Mitin, who comes from a Ukrainian family of Baptists who were persecuted for their faith in Soviet times, vouched for them. In the nineties they emigrated to the USA.

Siberia stands as Russia's most abundant macroregion in terms of natural resources, yet paradoxically, it grapples with significant disadvantages. Boasting 88% of the nation's natural gas reserves, only 16.8% of households have access to this vital resource—lower than anywhere else in the country. Historically, the state has extracted resources from local residents, and recently, this trend has escalated to include the relocation of residents themselves, sending them to Ukraine. As a compensation for fathers, husbands, and sons being sent to the front lines, their families receive firewood to endure the harsh winter of 2022-2023 without freezing. Correspondents from Novaya Gazeta traverse Siberia, engaging with ordinary residents, local officials, and the families of those mobilized, delving into their perspectives on poverty, the ongoing special operation, and the contentious necessity of sending their loved ones to the front lines. This film is part of the documentary project «The Assignment» made by Novaya Gazeta journalists who remain in Russia and continue to work under war censorship and risks. Film editor – Kirill Sakharnov.

A turning point for Russia in 1991. Exiled writer, dissident and human rights activist Georgy Vladimov in Niederhausen. Finding himself in a forced, joyless emigration, he “envyed this crowd and felt as one of the biggest losses” the impossibility of being with her in Russia. The film was based on Vladimov's unfinished novel "Long Way to Gipperary". The film is voiced by Valentin Gaft.

In the first series of the cycle, we are talking about the first wave of emigration, which brought almost two million refugees to foreign shores.

An artistic study of why people make moonshine and how this hobby is built into their everyday life. Sergey is not so much an outstanding bootlegger as a collective portrait of the generation that went through Perestroika and Chechnya.

Dans l'appartement de la famille Brodsky de la maison Muruzi, il est prévu d'ouvrir un musée en l'honneur du poète, lauréat du prix Nobel, expulsé de son pays natal, pour une seule journée. Le film de Pavel Medvedev, empreint de bouffonnerie et de grotesque, raconte une tragi-comédie jouée entre les murs d'un appartement communal de Saint-Pétersbourg.

A documentary-experimental film that tells about the life and culture of the Volga Germans, as well as about the heritage of this people. Eigengrau is an illusory dark gray color that people see in the absence of light.

Dmytro Bahnenko, a journalist in Kherson, southern Ukraine, spent three months secretly recording his city’s resistance to the Russian occupation. In an extraordinary film for BBC Eye, Dmytro chronicles the harsh reality of life under Russian control, as food and medicines become scarce, people flee and others disappear. Dmytro and his wife Lidia struggle to shelter their five-year-old daughter Ksusha from the war as she increasingly senses the danger around her. “I don’t want them to shoot bombs at me,” she says. After a close relative is threatened by the Russian military, the family makes a difficult decision to try to escape.

In Russia, it’s been dangerous for ordinary people to speak up against Vladimir Putin’s regime for years, but new censorship laws introduced since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 have made it tougher than ever. Despite huge risks, Russian filmmakers have been filming the impact of the war inside their country. Whilst many thousands have fled, those that stayed are having to choose - to oppose, support or stay silent about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

In the format of a monologue, 10 people from 10 different generations and decades answer 2 frank, personal, eternal questions, reflecting an entire age era of human opinions about happiness and regret.

The film speaks about nature, ecology and people. How do they affect each other? How does nature and ecology change because of the human activity? How do people survive in the changed conditions?

In this film, intimacy is created through the human gaze. The gaze becomes the support of life, and the very life of a person turns into an act of looking, contemplating oneself. Looking into his own memory, captured on video, or into the natural landscape, the viewer seeks to discern order in chaos, to discern the actions of specific forces in the elements, to discern the plot in the flow of time.

The evolution of the mother's soul through the eyes of her children.

Memories of childhood keep indescribable feelings of freedom, amazing experiments, carefree happiness and eternal love. The past tends to be forgotten, and only the destroyed walls of the pioneer camp remain, keeping the secrets of the past Soviet era.

Tanya works as a taxi driver 101 km from Moscow. Here everyone knows each other, if not personally, then through acquaintances. It seems to belated passengers that they have met Tanya more than once; heart-to-heart conversations and drunken confessions are constantly heard in a taxi. And although Tanya is the fifth for the dispatchers of her fleet, she is always the first by nature. She obscenely curses the workers who washed her car badly, raises children herself and sells vodka in large quantities, at night, after working in a taxi.

The film paints a portrait juxtaposing two immigrants : Irina Makeenko, born in France but who left to live in the USSR at the age of 12, and Vladimir Kozlov, the film’s director, who arrived in France after the fall of the Soviet Union. White Russians established in the region of Toulouse since the 1920s, the parents of Irina Makeenko believed in Stalin’s promises and returned to the USSR in 1947. Nearly 50 years later, after Perestroïka, Vladimir Kozlov did the same journey in reverse – he, also, motivated by the dream of a better life.

A quarter of a century ago, the documentary film by Juris Podnieks “Is It Easy to Be Young?” was a triumph on the cinema screens of the Soviet Union. Has it become easier for today's youth of Russia than it was for their peers in the USSR?