Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky is not just one of the founders of world color photography, the author of the first color postcards in the Russian Empire and the publisher of the Amateur Photographer magazine. As early as the beginning of the 20th century, he was the first to realize the exceptional mission of color photography: only photography “in natural colors” will fully preserve the appearance of what can be lost at any moment. The professor set himself the fantastic goal of traveling around and capturing the entire Russian Empire on a camera in order to leave a complete “collection of sights” to posterity. Enlisting the help of the tsar, Prokudin-Gorsky captured thousands of objects on the territory of the entire Russian Empire. The film tells about the fate and professional feat of Prokudin-Gorsky, gives a panorama of the pre-revolutionary empire and portraits of its contemporaries. In the footsteps of Prokudin-Gorsky, the film crew of Leonid Parfyonov visited 12 regions to see for themselves the changes that had taken place in the country. The film was attended by the grandchildren of Prokudin-Gorsky, who live in France, as well as experts from the US Library of Congress.

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.

The material for the film was a unique photograph of the Kexholm regiment, taken in 1903. A photographic plate 65 by 110 cm (more than 1000 people in the frame) made it possible to clearly reproduce both entire groups and individual faces of soldiers. All filmed in one shot. The counterpoint to the image is fragments of letters and memoirs of soldiers and officers of the pre-revolutionary army. At all times, for the Russian soldier, the main principles were love for the Motherland, loyalty to the oath, and sacrifice.

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?

An attempt to comprehend the changes that have taken place in Russia with people over 100 years, realized in the unusual genre of comparing the current reality and photographs taken at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. The photographs, taken by Russian realist photographer Maxim Dmitriev, were printed as large posters and traveled with the film crew to the places where they were taken. People of different classes, social groups and professions consider "themselves" a century later and talk about life and about those they see in the photographs.

The portrait of the last Russian tsar, captured in unique archival photographs taken by the court photographer von Hahn during the sovereign's hunts in the reserved Belovezhye, rhymes with the footage of the chronicle of the First World War and the mass death of Russian soldiers.

A German soldier took a huge amount of pictures on the Russian front. These photographs formed the evidence base for his conviction as a Nazi criminal.

The history of human life in photographs. A very personal film made by a director about his beloved late wife.

For twelve years, war photographer Oleg Klimov captured on film the collapse of the Soviet Union. He was present at almost all military and ethnic conflicts in the 90s. His photographs were on the front pages of many Western newspapers, as silent witnesses to the wars in the former Soviet Union. But Oleg's career also influenced his personality. After several quiet years, he unexpectedly finds a war injury on his own. Driven by inner longing, he returns to some of the places where he photographed people during the war, to Nagorno-Karabakh, Abkhazia and Chechnya, to find those who are depicted in the pictures.

From the author: The film is my declaration of love for the people of the country in which I was born and lived for half a century. From photographs taken over the course of thirty years, at close range and without the "author's" distance in the montage, in my opinion, a whole human life in its various manifestations has developed.

Cave paintings and our photo albums have the same source: death. But when does a memory become an image? How does memory work and what is more real: fact or our perception?

Real street photography is gradually fading into oblivion in favor of modern trends, but at one time for Anya it became salvation from the alcohol pit and a new meaning in life. At the moment, she is one of the last who is still seriously involved in this art form. Her unique method consists of a long search for documentary photography on the streets of St. Petersburg. Anya meets the hero of one of her old photographs and invites him to try again to become a model for a new photo story. The characters get closer, and Anya creates new unique photographs, which the protagonist compares with the moment.

This is a film about the relationship of the author with the material of his own work, in which the material itself is the protagonist and where the author has no choice but to become the same material himself in order to be able to interact with it on an equal footing.

This film follows Ukrainian soldiers and civilians from the perspective of a photographer who decided to document modern war with the first photographic technique. Using the technique that dates back to the 19th century poses a question of the absurdity and the timelessness of war.

The protagonist of the film is a man of absolutely incredible biography and fantastic character. Anatoly Lebed. He went through 5 wars and died in 2012, crashed on a motorcycle. Very little was known about his life. After all, the details of such a specific professional activity are not taken out on the front pages of newspapers. In addition, Lebed himself was very laconic and did not like to talk publicly about his past. He called the war simply work, and, as a rule, kept silent about his awards and wounds.

Animal photographer Olga Michi shows viewers the rarest and hardest-to-reach representatives of wildlife face to face. Each episode of the program is one journey, during which a portrait gallery is born, for example, mountain gorillas, Komodo dragons or a unique population of elephants in the equatorial multi-tiered forest of central Africa. How did man manage to make forest elephants dangerous? And can an extreme photographer get close to wild elephants to get close-up portraits of them?

A man who was lost in the war and found himself in Venice. A sniper who became a photographer because the optics of a rifle are similar to those of a camera. Roman Cherpak fled the Ukrainian SSR at the age of 14, grew up in Israel and is now raising two sons in Venice and Moscow. He has his own gallery-studio in the center of Venice, where he exhibits his work and teaches.

Engines of the future. The true creators of the revolution. Spiritual revolution. The stars of the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century managed to make a real world revolution. Their works, their ideas still influence the life of every modern person. The film will focus on the Russian avant-garde in art and literature. Vladimir Mayakovsky, Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, David Burliuk, Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Tatlin and many others. They were called hooligans and brawlers from art, and they were looking for a new form for a new life. They changed everything from painting and architecture to advertising and music. It was a challenge to the whole world, a rebellion and an attempt to create a man of the future. That is why today's young people should talk about the most revolutionary trend in art. They try on the roles of avant-garde artists, evaluate situations and facts, looking into the past from the 21st century.

A documentary detective story about travel, photography, the search for identity, memory and relationships between people in the modern world. Lada, a Czech traveler, accidentally finds full cassettes of negative film packed in a plastic bag in Sweden. She brings all 22 cassettes home to Prague, submits them to print, and receives 756 captivating shots from a trip of seven Asian men, possibly from China. The film then goes on to tell the story of the search for these unknown tourists, based only on photographs they have lost. The film crew, driven by the desire to return the pictures, investigating the mysterious life of these Asians, reveals the traits of their characters, and with them the nature of modern man.

He was the first German to photograph Auschwitz. He became the chronicler of the young FRG and GDR. His iconic pictures of the ‘68 movement shape our perception to this day. He continues to work on a series of photographs that he began years ago: the legendary photographer Michael Ruetz. His family originally came from Riga and were publishers of the newspaper "Rigaer Rundschau". Out of fear of Stalin, the family emigrated to Germany in the early 1940s, but they came from bad to worse.

Festivals:
DokFest Munich (Germany, 2023)
DokFest Kassel (Germany, 2023)