Forty of our contemporaries and ten simple questions. And each of the forty is so unlike the other that it is impossible to form a general portrait of our time from the mosaic of their answers! So what brings us together, what makes us a society and a people? Are we ready to accept others for who they are?

The Golden Moose restaurant was a Turku legend. An old-fashioned funky establishment, opened in 1968 and seemingly never having changed since then. A meeting place for friends and family. A shrine for hundreds of locals. A place many called home. A family – for those who served there, as well as those being served. Now, in December 2016, the building has been bought by a major Finnish retail corporation in order to open a new supermarket, and the restaurant has to close its doors forever…

Under the guidance of architect Renzo Piano, the historic building of the HPP-2 power plant on Bolotnaya Embankment is being transformed into a cultural site. The film is a kaleidoscope of narratively unrelated scenes, united by a reflection on how art invades and influences our lives. The lifting of the air ducts is the same performance as the dropping of the inflatable scenery in the GES-2 Opera performance, and the planting of the forest is an act of actionism extended over two seasons, not inferior in its meditativeness and recurrence to the performance “Sorrow will conquer happiness”.

How are you feeling on this New Year's Eve? How has 2022 changed you? With what feeling did you spend it? What do you dream about most? What do you want right now? The author asked these questions on New Year's Eve 2023 and decided to ask them to passers-by. This is a chronicle of one New Year's Eve, a search for feelings and a collection of people's wishes.

This story began in the seventies. Then the American ornithologist George Archibald turned to Soviet scientists led by Vladimir Flint with a proposal to cooperate in the protection of the white Siberian crane. This species was little studied and was considered endangered. Since then, we know much more about white cranes. Now on Earth there are two disparate populations of Siberian Cranes. One is East Siberian. These birds nest in the north of Yakutia and migrate to China. There are more than three thousand of them, and in the near future they are not threatened with extinction. A few thousand kilometers away, another population of Siberian Cranes lives. They nest in the lower reaches of the Ob, and fly to India or Iran for the winter. There are only twenty of them left. This film is about how people are trying to save this West Siberian branch of white cranes.

The heroine of the film Marina, it would seem, has already passed her thorny path of dance from distant Turkmenistan to the championship of Russia, Europe, the stage of Los Angeles. However, today her life is a constant race in which Marina strives to ensure the prosperity of the dance company she created. What is more important, to raise a star out of your 4-year-old mulatto daughter Nicole, or still at least once again go on the stage of a giant show with the stars, albeit as a backup dancer, but in your favorite position in the first line in the middle?

In the summer heat, even a Russian village can seem idyllic.

This film was shot in an amazing place, in the very north of Transbaikalia, in the Charskaya hollow, surrounded by the peaks of Kodar, Udokan and the Kalarsky ridge. Since ancient times, only Evenks and reindeer herds roamed here. Civilization came here only in the middle of the 20th century for the first Soviet uranium, which was mined by convicts, and for copper from the unique Udokan deposit. But what brought our contemporaries here?

Today Moscow is experiencing a construction boom. Our capital does not remember such a grand construction since the 30-40s. It was then that Moscow saw wide avenues and highways, high-rise buildings and granite embankments, the scale of which staggers the imagination. Unraveling the extraordinary life story of the architect Vyacheslav Oltarzhevsky, the chief architect of Moscow Sergey Kuznetsov makes a journey through time. Opening archives, looking for forgotten addresses and documents, finding Oltarzhevsky's relatives, he bit by bit adds up the fate of a person.

A sharp one and a half hour conversation with the creators, supporters and opponents of the draft amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation. What exactly is changing? Why are these emergency changes needed? Is it possible without them? And in which Russia will we wake up after the adoption of the amendments? The authors try to answer all these questions as objectively as possible.

These women were to be born and live in Moscow. They are the children of Muscovites who were repressed in the 30s and 40s of the last century. There are not many of them, only about 1,500 left for the whole country. All their lives, the “children of the GULAG” have been living in exile, although their parents have been officially rehabilitated, and the law guarantees them the right to return to their former place of residence. In 2019, they won the case in the Constitutional Court, but the State Duma is in no hurry to amend the legislation, and the government proposes to stand in the general queue for housing and wait another 30 years. Meanwhile, every month the number of children in the Gulag is decreasing.

A story about the inhabitants of the Buryat village of Moigoty, of which there are only six left, living for more than twenty years outside of civilization without light and electricity. Being forgotten by the authorities, they do not want to go anywhere, they are building a hotel in the hope that tourists will come to them, and they are waiting for electricity and electricity to be brought to them.

The heroes of the film are a polar explorer, the head of the North Pole drifting station Tomas Petrovsky and his mother Romualda Flerovna. The scenes are the Arctic drifting station SP-33 and the Belarusian village of Petrovskoye. An eternal story about a son who leaves home for no reason, into an incomprehensible and dangerous cold, and about a mother who does not understand him, loves him and prays for him. And here, at home, there is paradise, buzzing bees, a blooming garden, a clean river, warm earth.

In "Poor People" Ilya Kabakov talks about the origins of his work, the tragic fate of his mother, who influenced the worldview and the subsequent formation of the artist. Together with his wife and co-author Emilia, he talks about unofficial art in the USSR and the emergence of Moscow conceptualism, about his emigration to Europe and the USA, and how, after a “30-year exhibition hunger” (in the Soviet Union, Kabakov refused to exhibit publicly), he received a worldwide confession. Today, his works are included in the collections of the world's leading museums, including the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the National Museum of Modern Art Center Georges Pompidou (Paris) and the Kunsthalle (Hamburg).

Female circumcision is the name given to female genital mutilation. Female circumcision is practiced, including in the North Caucasus. There is no age limit; both an adult woman and a baby can trim the clitoris and labia. Most often girls 5-12 years old are circumcised. The authors spoke with women who were circumcised, found out where this mutilating rite came from and how it relates to Islam, and also answered the question of why the numerous victims are silent.

In Russia, the police are known to break up gay parades. Who would have thought that among the dispersers there are "secret sympathizers."

1939 Moscow. A monstrous murder has been committed in the famous aristocratic house number 12 on Bryusov Lane. The wife of the famous director Vsevolod Meyerhold is dead. There was a rumor in theater circles that an old curse had come true. Leningrad, early 80s. There are several attacks on the apartments of trade workers. The criminals take valuables and kill all witnesses without hesitation. The search for criminals is carried out in an emergency mode, and no one realizes that it will take five years to uncover the secret of the brutal killers.

When, passing in a train through the forests of the Russian Plain, at short stops you suddenly notice rare local residents, you hear their calm, thick dialects, immersed in the noisy branches of ancient trees, you involuntarily ask yourself, is this a reality? It's true? Does everything happen in reality, or does it just seem that we see someone, hear? Maybe it's just the forest telling and showing us its sad melodic tales?

Siberia. The last four houses remained in the old village on the Angara River. Before the eyes of their inhabitants, they burned a large village and continue to burn. The hands of Siberian prisoners are cleaning up the bed of the new reservoir of the fourth hydroelectric power station on the river. Tractors work menacingly around the huts that have survived so far. The villagers meet every new day with fear that they will be burned down. But, despite this, they do not leave their home. This is the last year of the life of the Angarsk village.

Last trip in an ambulance. The driver, a cheerful Armenian, comes to those who can no longer be helped and becomes their guide between life and death. The road, meanwhile, shines with bright lanterns, blurs into an abstract pattern, screams with sirens. There is an inexorable countdown.