Vsevolod Korshunov

One day in the life of the girl Lena, looking for reasons (not) to get acquainted with men, (not) to have a family and children, (not) to love.

The final match of a commercial tournament in classical chess should hold no surprises: the long-term champion annually breaks the bank, easily beating all opponents. However, this year one opponent has prepared an unusual strategy. When posing for the photographers and shaking hands with the intelligent and constrained Champion, the Opponent quietly tells him that he spent the night with the Champion’s wife.

A two part documentary about the first five decades of Russian cinema: from its birth to 1953 - the death of Stalin and the first seedlings of the thaw. The film covers the most important milestones of cinema. Its introduction as a lowbrow entertainment, the impact of WWI and revolutions on the film process. The principal masters - Kuleshov, Vertov, Eisenstein - and their discoveries in film language at the turn of the 1920-30s. The arrival of sound. The evacuation of the Soviet film industry during WWII and the heroic work of the wartime documentary crews. Restricted film production and early signs of the thaw in the late 1940s - early 1950s. Film historians and art critics, directors and screenwriters put the history of cinema in a broader context, considering the path that the country took from Tsarist Russia to the totalitarian state under the rule of Stalin.