Films

St. Petersburg, city of dreamers: in an inn lives Dzhus, a young Kazakh who dreams of a better life. At the city’s Municipal Affairs, Anna, a tough woman, makes her employees work to the bone but dreams of retiring. Dina, the xenophobic girl, is a young streetcar driver who dreams of taking power. Nikita, the young boy urban climber who travels the city’s rooftops as a tour guide, dreams of success.

As we follow these characters over the course of a year and seven popular holidays, the authoritarian control of the Kremlin weighs on all of them, leaving little room for dreams.

This is the story of one of the most famous Russian filmmakers: Alexei German. He spent several years shooting of his last film Hard to be a god. It is a film about a man who tries to fight slavery and advocate freedom.

That makes his life difficult, but his art unique. It’s a film about his complex relationship with his team, which he rules with an iron hand. This is a film about freedom and power, about the authority and submission of men, about impossible dream to change the course of history. It is a film about the paradoxes of Russia.

At last, this is a film about the vision of the Swiss director and its relationship to this universe. In a certain way, he shares the fate of the main character of German’s film: the one of a casual observer on another planet: Russia.

In a train which leads to an unknown destination, a Russian mother tells her life with her nine children. Liuba escaped from her violent husband with all her children to North of Russia. She raises them along with her daughter Alesia. They work both at the farm in de country-side. All their love, they give them to their children. They take to their house another hungry little boy, two year old, Sacha, the son of another girl working on the farm. Liuba and Alesia belong to those people who sacrifice themselves in the name of their love of mother. Two women are still hoping to find a good husband but the search for a husband ends up in a struggle to kick out a parasite. A film about strong women with all their hopes, fragile children with all their innocence, weak men with all their flaws.