Anna Gusarova

Based on the novel by Booker Prize Winner Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party is set in August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?

An amazing story about the life of a modern girl and her friends, the same desperate young people who do not want to put up with the gray routine and boredom, eager to escape from the real world into the world of their dreams and fantasies.

During a nationwide moral panic caused by a recent spike in teenage suicides two federal investigators are sent to a small Russian town to review a cold case involving a suspicious death of a schoolgirl. Initially seeing their task as a mere PR stunt both gradually start to loose their focus as they venture deeper into the paranoid world of conspiracy theories surrounding the case.