Mikhail Bolotnikov

Your Contemporary

The action takes place in the 1920s. It is about the everyday work of criminal investigation staff in a provincial town, who are engaged in an unyielding battle against a well-organized gang of murderers and robbers.

Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Georgy Burkov, Leonid Yarmolnik, Galina Polskikh in a sad comedy by Sergey Nikonenko based on Vasily Shukshin’s short stories “Touches on the Portrait”, “The Stubborn One”, “The Strong Go Further”. Nikolai Knyazev works in a TV repair shop. God has blessed him with golden hands and heart, yet the majority of his fellow-town folk think he’s a bit nutty. And for a good reason: he’s constructing a perpetual motion machine, for years has been writing a philosophical treatise, dreaming of world fame and looking down on the other inhabitants of this sinful earth. But no matter how hard he is looking, he can’t see where his happiness (that is, post-office employee Lyuba) lies…

Journalist arrives in Odessa and falls into the hands of scammers who skillfully rob him. The situations are sometimes comical and sometimes absurd, but such is life...

Fitil is a popular Soviet/Russian television satirical/comedy short film series which ran for about 500 episodes. Some of the episodes were aimed at children, and were called Фитилёк, Fitilyok, Little Fuse. Each issue contained from the few short segments: documentary, fictional and animated ones. Directed by various artists, including Leonid Gaidai who presented his famous trio of Nikulin, Vitsin and Morgunov into the cast. It was called in USSR as "the anecdotes from the Soviet government".