Perevoz is a dying island village on the border of Belarus and Russia. On a neighboring island lies a cemetery, where the boatman Tolik ferries people across.

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.

Arkady Zverev is a serial killer. Behind him is the tail of crimes in several large cities of Russia. He is detained after he eats a man with his 12-year-old girlfriend. Soon Zverev takes his own life, and the official investigation is stopped. Relatives demand a trial, meanwhile a certain woman falls in love with the image of Zverev and tries to prove his innocence.

Motygino is the smallest and most inaccessible settlement in Russia, which has a local drama theater. Recently, a young St. Petersburg director arrived there and decided to make him a fashionable place: he invited his friends-actors from the capital and began to develop a new theater. Do you think a warm welcome awaited him?

The last thing Armenian citizens in 2022 expected was that their new neighbors would be thousands of Russians who fled Russia out of conscience or fear of ending up in Ukrainian black soil. Russian propaganda declares them traitors and calls on "those who remained" to unite in hatred against "those who left for warm countries". But are these countries warm? And can’t the "left" themselves cope with their own hatred without help from others?

In 1982, a fire broke out at the Soviet Antarctic research station Vostok and destroyed the power plant. The expedition was left without electricity and heating right before the onset of the four-month polar night, with an outside temperature of -70 ° C. The polar explorers did not ask for help, because they knew that there was nowhere to find it. In the Soviet Union, no measures were taken to reduce risks in extreme conditions. If critical situations arose, people got out of the situation thanks to their courage and heroism. So it was in this case.

From the author: “Pyotr Mamonov is a genius, one of those who shaped my consciousness, a man whose name for me is a sign of that irreconcilable position that an artist should occupy in cultural and social terms. Quite unexpectedly, I was very close and found a friend whom I seem to understand. This friend turned out to be Ilya, the son of Mamonov. When I suggested that Ilya make a film about him, he immediately warned me that if I wanted to contact his father in this way, then I would not succeed.

In 1829, Gazi-Muhammad was elected imam and began to gather an army, declaring a ghazavat, a holy war against the infidels. Ghazi-Muhammad inflicted short sudden blows on Russia and quickly retreated to the mountains. The first victories made the imam very popular. After the battle in Gimry, the village lay in ruins, the Russians and mountaineers turned out to be worthy opponents. The battle in Gimry was fatal for Gazi-Muhammad, but the Caucasian war had only just begun.

The only time a high school teacher feels like her students at the Unified State Examination is when, with a cheat sheet, she needs to say farewell to chicks that have already fledged for 8 years, leaving their secondary education nest forever.

A young woman, Alfinaz, mother of two minor children, is going on a long journey to meet her husband. He is a life-term prisoner, and his wife is an exemplary Muslim woman who faithfully waits and hopes for her husband's release. A story about female strength and humility, about humility before the trials that have fallen and gratitude to the Almighty.

Thirty years ago Soviet citizens woke up and saw Swan Lake on TV. A putsch began in the USSR: part of the party elite removed President Mikhail Gorbachev from power. The GKChP members tried to tighten the screws and take away freedom from the media. The journalists then fought the censorship and won. In 2021, the profession of a journalist in Russia will be called prohibited: dozens of people will become “foreign agents” and will be forced to leave Russia, and many independent media will recognize them as “undesirable”.

Two are locked in an apartment on the eve of Victory Day. Where others see fireworks, they hear explosions and air raid alerts.

Nineteen-year-old conscript Aleksey was seconded to the northern border part, remote from civilization. This is one of the few border outposts guarding vast territories of the Russian state near the Arctic Ocean. Five more soldiers, middle-aged contractors, serve at the post. Each has its own story and its own secret, which made them hide from the real world in this snowy unreality. But still, colleagues gradually begin to open up to each other. And how else to carry out an absurd service on the northern border littered with snow, hundreds of kilometers from the nearest tree?