Ten-year-old Oleg lives in the eastern part of Ukraine — a warzone that often echoes with anti-aircraft fire and missile strikes. Sometimes these sounds are in the distance, while other times they’re frighteningly close. While many have already left this dangerous area, Oleg remains with his grandmother, who has taken care of him since the death of his mother. They have nowhere else to go. While waiting for the war to end, Oleg enjoys hanging out with his younger cousin Yarik and an older boy Kostia. Together they go on adventures, talk about what makes a real man, test each other’s boundaries, but sometimes they go too far. This observational film follows a year in the life of Oleg and emphasizes the warm bond he has with his grandmother. By sticking close to Oleg, The Distant Barking of Dogs shows the effect of conflict on children.

One day, Dutch film maker van der Horst was given her inheritance: 6 square meters, one sixth of a small, wooden house in the Russian countryside where her mother grew up. It was as if life had handed her a card she felt forced to play.

History of the twentieth century. View from the village. The path of the Russian peasantry in time and space from pre-revolutionary Cossack villages and rich Siberian villages to the taiga Ural villages, to the peasant Gulag, with children and the elderly, to certain death. The authors of the documentary trace this tragic Odyssey from the manifesto of 1861 to the beginning of the Great Patriotic War. They offer society a different view of both the pre-revolutionary Russian village and the civil war, which, in their opinion, was not a war of some reds with some whites, but a war of the state against the peasantry, with its people, because the peasants at that moment made up 80 percent of the population. What was behind this unprecedented attempt in history to destroy 10 million of the best, most talented people of the village?

A cycle of short documentaries about the Russian hinterland, about the daily life that goes on there, about the relationship between people.

Nature and man, space and time, life and death - in the far north of Russia, everything merges together. Somewhere beyond the Arctic Circle, a few dozen people continue to live surrounded by water, stone and sand. Disconnected from the infrastructure and forgotten by the state, these people are forced to deal with their own problems. Their villages are threatened by the fate of many Russian villages - slow, inevitable extinction. Each scene in the film questions the meaning of life and shows a person's life in a place where nature writes the laws.

FESTIVALS - AWARDS & NOMINATIONS

Zürich Film Festival (Switzerland) / Focus Competition - World premiere

German Cinematography Award 2022 (Germany) - Nomination
European Cinematography AWARDS, ECA (Netherlands) - Best Documentary
International Cosmopolitan Film Festival of Tokyo (Japan) - Best Feature Film
IDFF Artdocfest (Latvia) - Jury Special Mention
ORION International Film Festival (Australia) - Best Cinematography
Wisdom Tree International Film Festival (India) - Best Art Documentary
Golden Giraffe International Film Festival (France) - Best Feature Documentary
ARFF Paris - Around Films International Festival (France) - Fest Regards Special Mention

COMPETITION

Achill Island Film Festival (Ireland)
BIFF - Boden International Film Festival (Sweden)
DDIFF - Dingle Distillery International Film Festival (Ireland)
FICMEC - Festival Internacional de Cine, Medioambiental de Canarias (Spain)
Flahertiana (Russia)
FSFF - Fünf Seen Film Festival (Germany)
IFF Arctic Open (Russia)
Jerusalem Anthropological Film Festival (Israel)
MAFF - Matsalu Nature Film Festival (Estonia)
New York Film Week (USA)
Prague International Film Awards (Czech Republic)
Rotterdam Independent Film Festival (Netherlands)
Sacramento Independent Film Festival (USA)
Seattle Filmmaker Awards (USA)
UMFF - Ulju Mountain Film Festival (Southkorea)
Vancouver Independent Film Festival (Canada)
Vancouver Movie Awards (Canada)

Women of different nationalities live in central Dagestan. In 1994, gynecologist Aishat Magomedova opened a charity hospital for them in the center of Makhachkala. She was worried about the situation of mountain women in the villages of Dagestan, where there are no roads, gas and water. According to local traditions all the physical work in the family falls on the woman. Aishat helped them cope with the difficulties of everyday life and for fifteen years she gave free medical care and psychological support. In winter 2009 the hospital was evicted from the premises. How is the life of mountain women going now, in 2019? In the film women tell their stories.

On the very edge of the village of Ponazyrevo, in a wooden house with the loud name "Rehabilitation Center", people who have nowhere to go live. The center was organized and sheltered by the rector of the prison church, the priest Father Evgeny. There are strict rules in the house, no alcohol, but from time to time, someone breaks down, starts drinking, leaves. Then he returns. Miron wandered after his release from prison, he did not have a home. He was found dying in an abandoned car and given shelter. He is crippled, half of his body is paralyzed. Outside the taiga window, the family broke up, past ties were broken. How do such people live, what do they think, what do they feel, what can they hope for, what helps them survive?

An essay about the fate of a village woman, the weigher Shura Alekseeva, whose dreams help her survive in this difficult world. The eternal theme of the Russian woman, the Russian province and the everlasting expectation of love.

A film about the narrow-gauge railway Seven-city - Druzhba. The film crew went to one of the most remote villages in the Vologda Oblast, which survives only on this narrow gauge railway. The train went for 5 hours, in addition, periodically derailed.

Most researchers consider Andrei Platonov's novel "Chevengur" a great dystopia, but there are people who are sure that there was a settlement with the same or a similar name, for example, Kuchugury, and with the same fate. And in general, there is a view of Platonov as a brilliant documentary filmmaker who did not compose anything, but only wrote down how it really was.

What is going to happen if the painting of the great Dutch artist suddenly comes to life in a half-abandoned Russian village?

In a cottage at the outskirts of a small village surrounded by the Altai Mountains there's a family rejected by the local community. Little by little we learn about their secrets. The story is haunting and it's difficult for the viewer to remember this is a documentary film. The attractive Russian surrealism turns out to be real life. The film was made under „Russia and Poland. New Gaze” project, 1st edition. The project was realized by Eureka Media and Adam Mickiewicz Institute with financial support of Polish Film Institute.

Nikolai Kochegarov is the only remaining resident of the village of Pashki. Only one of his houses has survived, standing in the middle of the field. All his life he was in prison, sometimes for his wife, sometimes for theft. He had a son who drank a lot, robbed houses and did nothing. And one day the son attacked his father, but the father defended himself and killed his own son. My father was given a year of probation. This was in 2011. And now he lives all alone, in winter he cannot get into the village. But every summer his daughter Tatyana visits him, who still loves him the way he is. And he loves her. This is a film about love between a father and his daughter, about the Russian soul and about the corners of the earth forgotten by civilization, where passions sometimes heat up to the limit.

The village of Good is located in the Siberian hinterland. The ambulance driver, Fedoseich, dreams of taking to the skies in a makeshift plane. The whole village is watching him. And here comes the cherished hour.

Russian fairy tale about real people.

White winter blizzard covers everything. We can rely now only on saints, on our prayers. The future has sailed away, with us left behind. Astray, we did not board the magic ship. The task at hand is simple — not to perish in the fog, not to die from the cold, not to get trapped under the ice. Not to fall in our own snares. Or are we all in one big trap anyway? Running around in a small circle, counting those who vanished.

About the life of two Russian village workers, farmers who have come a long way through the "dashing 90s" and are now building life anew.

For several years, the author has been making film observations of his heroes, peasants from two neighboring villages in the Lipetsk region. One of them, Uncle Vanya, is a poet, a local Kulibin, who builds a starship. The second, Uncle Kolya, wandered through life in an alcoholic stupor, but one day, having experienced a severe shock, he got out onto the “sober” highway. The most remarkable thing about the film is the author's point of view.

Rinat Sadykov lived all his life in the village of Oimur in Buryatia on the shores of Lake Baikal. He says that his wife wanted to move to the city, but he insisted on living in the village. Their children went to school in Oimura. After the divorce, the ex-wife moved to the city. Lately, Sadykov worked as a lumberjack, and went to work in Irkutsk and Ulan-Ude, because there was no work in the village. For the same reason, Sadykov advised his youngest son Vyacheslav, when he joined the army on conscription, to sign a contract and remain in military service. The last time the son came to the village to his father from the military unit for the new year 2022 to meet him together, and after that he went to the exercises in Belarus. After the start of the war on February 24, people from the military registration and enlistment office came to Sadykov's house and reported that Vyacheslav had died. They waited a month for a funeral, and then Sadykov signed a contract and volunteered to go to war.

The exchange of old Soviet passports for new Russian passports is a milestone in the life of the country. A provincial travel photographer wanders around remote Siberian villages and takes pictures of their inhabitants for new passports. But sometimes they will invite you to film the wedding. And somewhere you can buy a piglet. Following the village photographer and carefully observing everyday rural life, the filmmakers create a kind of poetic canvas that tells about the worldview of people living in the Russian outback at the junction of two cultures, Soviet and modern. The film won an award at the Russia Open Documentary Film Festival in Yekaterinburg.