Georgy Iobadze

In the world where relationship is a real hunt and men hunt women, young Tyomik experiences a strange new feeling to his very first prey.

Lyudmila is a successful realtor in the capital. Pictures from the past pop up in her memory, and the viewer learns at what cost a single mother from the province managed to cherish Moscow's well-being. Lyudmila's story is typical, it reflects, like in a mirror, the pain points of modern life, forcing us to make our hourly choices. Is it worth a deal with the conscience of material comfort? Is it possible to achieve success in a megalopolis today and remain an honest person? Won't a "bright future" built on betrayal of one's own ideals lead to the decline of genuine human values?

The year is 1941. Nazi Germany has declared war on the USSR and begins launching air assaults on Moscow and St. Petersburg. Stalin immediately orders a retaliatory air campaign under the code name “Wings over Berlin.” The closest entry point to Berlin from the USSR border was an airfield on the Estonian island Saaremaa in the Baltic Sea. It would be a 7-hour flight over enemy territory in outdated aircraft leaving no chance of survival for the tail crew members in case of attack. Despite overwhelming odds, the first units completed the mission and made it back to base safely, unlike many others that followed.

Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!

The film is about the relations between the inhabitants of Russia and the Caucasus, and about their influence on each other. Young Georgian Georgi Iobadze tells the audience the story of the Vainakhs (a group of peoples of the North Caucasus and Georgia) in the period from 1813 to 1913.

While digging one of the many tunnels for the Moscow metro, Soviet workers unearth ruins of a dungeon. The site is closed, the metro tunnel is diverted, and amidst the bustle no one notices the tunnel workers’ foreman pocketing a little ‘souvenir’ – a book-sized frame made of precious metals featuring an inscription in an unknown language. Decades later, the foreman’s grandson Ilya, who works as a courier, discovers the ancient relic in a pile of old junk. Oblivious to the true value of the family heirloom, he soon learns about it from a mysterious stranger. The relic is the key to the secret location of the priceless ancient library that belonged to Ivan the Terrible. What Ilya doesn’t know is that the search for the lost library has been going on for centuries, and now very powerful people are after him. Ilya and the mysterious stranger decide to try their luck in finding the library.

1993 - the story of one family suddenly turns out to be the history of the whole country. The relationship of painfully and inextricably linked husband and wife, emergency workers, and the growing up of their daughter against the backdrop of global change.