Known for Acting
June 21, 1941, Brest fortress. Lieutenant Andrey Kizhevatov, Major Pyotr Gavrilov and Commissar Yefim Fomin were engaged in daily business. There was also a boy trumpeter Sasha Akimov from the regimental orchestra, who secretly smoked and selflessly loved the girl Vera. None of the servicemen knew that the next morning they would become the commanders of the last three hotbeds of resistance, and the boy was the only link between them in the stone cauldron of the first object of attack by Nazi troops in the USSR, the Brest Fortress.
The film covers the heroic defence of the Brest Fortress, which was attacked during the first strike of German invaders on June 22 1941. The story describes the events of the first days of the defence, including the three main resistance zones, headed by the regiment commander, Pyotr Mikhailovich Gavrilov, the commissar Efim Moiseevich Fomin and the head of the 9th frontier outpost, Andrey Mitrofanovich Kizhevatov. Many years later veteran Alexander Akimov again recalls the memories of the time, when he, then a 15 year old Sasha Akimov was deeply in love with the beautiful Anya and suddenly found himself in the middle of the bloody events of war.
In 16th-century Russia in the grip of chaos, Ivan the Terrible strongly believes he is vested with a holy mission. Believing he can understand and interpret the signs, he sees the Last Judgment approaching. He establishes absolute power, cruelly destroying anyone who gets in his way. During this reign of terror, Philip, the superior of the monastery on the Solovetsky Islands, a great scholar and Ivan's close friend, dares to oppose the sovereign's mystical tyranny. What follows is a clash between two completely opposite visions of the world, smashing morality and justice, God and men. A grand-scale film with excellent leading roles by Mamonov and Yankovsky. An allegory of Stalinist Russia
Father Alexander is trying to maintain peaceful life for his church amidst the Nazi occupation during WWII.
Belarus, summer 1942. The war has moved on, far off to the east. The life of a small town where the German authorities of the region have set themselves up is getting back to "normal". The Germans study Russian, flirt with the local girls, the women wash their clothes and feed them. They have to carry on somehow... But suddenly the teenage son of the film's heroine decides to run away to the partisans and blows up a German train so that they could accept him. He gets caught and the Germans have to execute him in order "to teach others a lesson". That's the order and it can't be disobeyed. The Germans know that this execution will bring an end to their peaceful lives. The local commandant understands this better than anyone as he is already involved in a close relationship with the boy's mother. But he can't ignore an order from his commanders...
The artist Anatoly Buslov has been living in Minsk for many years, but he still cannot escape the oppressive memories of the Chernobyl tragedy. His whole family, living then in a small village in the Gomel region, suffered greatly from radiation. Buslov goes to the place where he grew up, and with surprise and joy finds that the inhabitants of his native village have not fallen in spirit. This gives the artist strength, and he decides to paint the local church.
The location is the Belarusian forests, close to the Polish border, during Operation Bagration in the summer of 1944. The Red Army is preparing to advance, but on one segment of the front there are two serious obstacles: an unnamed hill, and a highly skilled German sniper. The local commander, Major Inozemtsev, suspects that the hill is a trap.
Each of the short stories is based on either one or several stories by a wonderful Russian writer. The heroes are ordinary people “of the people”, contemporaries of Shukshin, all of whose life’s ups and downs are inextricably linked with their country - the Soviet Union of the 60s-70s. The main thing that unites both the works themselves and the films made is a whole gallery of the brightest images and characters, a story about such different destinies and differently meaningful lives, a story in the center of which is invariably Man, with his love, quests, weaknesses and victories.
An orphan boy moves to his grandfather's village, where he finds a great friend, a dog from the forbidden Chernobyl zone.
Focuses on the lives of two married Polish couples (one Jewish, one Catholic) and the personal and social devastation wrought by the Holocaust and its aftermath.
