A cycle of educational and adventure programs dedicated to all kinds of historical versions, riddles and secrets.

Siberia. The sparsely populated village of Krotovo. Farmer Vasily Dmitrievich Abramov lives in the village completely alone, since in 2005 his sons were convicted of murder and sentenced to long prison terms. The film, which was filmed for 10 years, is the last work of the classic of Russian documentary film Valery Solomin. It was completed by his sons Evgeny and Viktor Solomin.

Once upon a time, photographer Yevgeny Burak was a photojournalist, published in large, "central" publications. And although most of his works were not published, he was a photo chronicler of the Smolensk region. Now all this is in the past, in the one that remained in the USSR. Now he is just a photographer. A photographer who decided to go back in time, to take a trip around his native region in search of the heroes of his old photographs of thirty or forty years ago. How are they now?

The truck driver Valerka and his partner were instructed to drive a fifty-ton transformer from St. Petersburg to Moscow. The men famously got down to business, but did not reach Moscow, halfway through the transformer fell off the truck. So the poor fellows got stuck by the road, waiting for the authorities, guarding valuable cargo from scrap metal hunters. For many months, Kostomarov and Kattin periodically visited Valerka, recording his stories about how he spends time guarding the transformer.

Natasha lives in Russia. She is an eight-year-old girl. She swims in the nearby lake although the water is sometimes cool. She has a brother who causes her a lot of trouble. She is bright, open, talkative. There is a close-up of a group of trees by the lake and of the birds in the reeds; in the distance we see the spires of an Orthodox church. Natasha with her ball, her brother, the camera, in her best dress. This portrait/self-portrait came to be thanks to the openness of Natasha, using a microphone, a Super 8 camera and a still camera.

"Yes, death!" is the battle cry of the National Bolsheviks. They are the main work of Eduard Limonov, the protagonists of a multi-figure novel of flesh and blood. Reincarnation of the RSDLP, political sect, or a radical artistic phenomenon?

Andrei Shkolny is a journalist, in the remote countryside of Russia and Moscow is a long way away. People are poor and disgusted by politics and newspapers. Surviving everyday life is quite hard enough. Shkolny left his job at the regional paper “The Leninist”, because he couldn’t go on writing articles about nothing. A journalist through and through, he created his own newspaper – Nasha Gazeta (Our Paper) – which now has about 7000 readers every week. People can read their own news. There are no articles about Moscow, about golden harvests, about impressive yet unrealised and unrealisable projects, but stories about the village that has had no water for three months, about the farmer who found his dog by barking himself, about the doctor who travels many kilometres by bicycle every day despite temperatures of –36. The authorities are not amused. Shkolny is convinced he is doing nothing wrong. Who will win in the end? Juxtaposing small, personal stories with the impressive background of contemporary Russian history, Nasha Gazeta reveals a beautiful and subtle portrait of a brave man who, despite oppostion, follows his heart.

The mining town of Norilsk sits in the heart of the Siberian Arctic, huddled behind its wind walls and bathed in the smoke and sulfur of its factories. While teenagers in the icy city dream of exile and nickel miners ponder the lost Soviet comradeship, descendants of Gulag prisoners and theatre artists seek to shed light on Norilsk's dark past, buried under ice and censorship. A Moon of Nickel and Ice fondly follows the lives of these inhabitants of the end of the world.

The New Saint is a film about Yevgeny Rodionov, an ordinary young Russian boy who fell in the first Chechen war after being taken prisoner and refusing to convert to Islam. He was proclaimed a martyr and many Russians found in Yevgeny their own unofficial saint. The life of Yevgeny’s mother underwent a radical change when her child ‘became’ a saint. By campaigning for his canonisation she keeps the memory of her son alive. The success of her mission is illustrated by the portrayal of Yevgeny’s image on icons throughout the country. Who is this holy soldier exactly and what makes him the perfect icon of Russia today?

The documentary film Another Life continues the main theme of The Happy People series: man’s faith in himself and his great capacity for survival. This is a film about strong people who are free spirits and who are not concerned with the majority of things that excite city dwellers. Perhaps these fates can serve as an example, can help us see ourselves through another person’s eyes, and allow us to take a new look at our own lives.

The art of calligraphy refers to Islamic heritage, culture and tradition. At the dawn of Islam, the use of Arabic script was considered sacred, and sacred texts gave rise to a rich abundance of manuscripts and began a tradition of calligraphy that, for more than a thousand years, was preserved and developed not only for the design of manuscripts, but also in the art of architecture, ceramics and miniatures.

After the collapse of the USSR, several not yet old single men returned to their parents' huts in a small Belarusian village. Not remembering the past, not thinking about the future, men live one day, escaping from loneliness with vodka and conversations. They are fragments of that life that has passed and which they will never return or glue together.

Nikolai Khardzhiev is the greatest connoisseur and collector of the Russian avant-garde, the owner of the rarest works, a collector who had taste, understanding, scent, and remarkable abilities of persuasion. An extraordinary person, a storehouse of knowledge and a keeper of treasures collected in a Moscow apartment. Towards the end of his life, he decided to leave and move his collection and archive to Holland. The result was a personal drama, the death of his wife, and a collection scattered around the world.

The incredible life story of a Tatar Soviet soldier who was captured by the German Nazis during World War II. Today, his daughter Sana is tracing the path of her silent father, trying to understand what made him the man she knew as a child, through his diaries, various personal and public archives and registries. As she accompanies the daughter in her journey, the filmmaker excavates film archives, to find traces of those millions of Soviet soldiers who were caught in the fire of dictators fighting, who were there but were easily left out of the narrative of the global war. As she “re-appropriates” the archival footage, the filmmaker searches for the soul of the image, for those small and subtle remnants of a massive, yet casually omitted, human tragedy.

A miniature woman in a bright red scarf, holding a plush mouse. Looking at her, you would not guess that she is 50 and that she has not been home for three years. An incredible love for life does not let her freeze on the cold streets of Moscow.

A poetic film essay on the verses of Arseny Tarkovsky reveals the secret of the fate and work of three outstanding film artists, Sergei Parazhdanov, Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Antipenko.

History of the road and return home. Both in the direct and in the metaphorical sense of these words. For 20 years now, the trucker hero has been traveling around Russia, and his wife is waiting for him at home. He is alone with the road. She is in the company of a faithful friend and protector of the dog Irbis. Here, relations are harmonious, the house is warm, and on the road everything is subordinated to the goal. And this could go on forever. But nothing in life lasts forever.

Through urban exploring, young anti authoritarian Russians and Ukrainians have found a way to take control over their own lives by confronting fear, and sharing their death defying stunts with millions of viewers online. But the realities of the conflict-ridden post-Soviet era - and the fragility of life - don't go away just because you are 300 feet up above the city or 100 feet below. "On the edge of freedom" portrays the riveting everyday lives of Angela, a 23-year old roofer from Moscow, and Vlad, a 28-year old digger from Kiev.

“I keep coming back to those memories. Death this time came very close and took my friend. And she left me. This is how the year began. The strangest year of my life. When I realized that I was gradually losing everything and did not understand how this happened. last year of the millennium. The first year of the life that was left to me for some reason. With this author's introduction, a film diary of one year begins with the miracle of a continuing life.

This story is about the Russian North. The research undertaken by the author began with the villages in the Arkhangelsk region, near the White Sea, where his family comes from and where he spent his childhood. A significant part of the villages is remote from cities and often has no connection with them, except for air transport.