Viktoriya Lupik

A Time to Get and a Time to Lose

Arina is the daughter of a Russian mother and Kurdish father, who left the family and went back to his homeland — Syria. Turning 19, Arina goes to see him in the middle of war-time. She tries to reconnect with him while he is surrounded by three other kids and a new Kurdish wife. Meanwhile, they decide to flee to Europe. The Netherlands becomes their new home. But after a while the family splits up. Arina is trying to be near and offer her support. Will she be able to help, when everything collapses?

The Lead

On a country road, Irina hits a dog and brings it to its owner Mikhail. His eight-year-old son Dima, who has been silent for a year due to psychological trauma, mistakes Irina for his dead mother. It’s time for Irina to leave, but Dima begins to become hysterical, and Mikhail, fearing that he will shut up again, forcibly holds Irina back. She becomes a prisoner in their house.

The Doll

The custom of making motanka dolls is ancient, rich in myths and legends. There is a belief that they help their owner. The main character of the film is a 12-year-old teenage girl, she studies at an art school, but does not believe in her abilities and goes through a coming-of-age crisis with the help of a Slavic doll. By wrapping a doll, its owner goes through a certain stage of growing up and forms her inner world. The doll sometimes helps her cope with difficult situations, and sometimes it does the opposite.

White Road

Having lived in Moscow for many years, successful political consultant Aldar returns to his home in Kalmykia to search for his mother who disappeared in the Steppe. He finds her with the help of the local shaman, and together they make the journey that they didn’t have time to take when she was still alive.

Handmade

This film tells about people whose hands create the main components of life on the planet every day. And it’s not just the material basis of our world made of metal, concrete or wood, but it’s also something that gives meaning to our lives, inspires and gives hope. The film’s characters — a locksmith and a fisherman, a steelworker and a farmer, a furniture maker and an anesthesiologist — are followed by the film’s Director, who suddenly turns from an observer into a creator.

Leonid Kogan. Unknown Chronicles

Pablo Picasso, Mstislav Rostropovich, Yasha Heifetz: all of them along with a series of outstanding figures of the 20th Century were captured for the film by a man who was an outstanding person himself. Leonid Kogan was a great violinist. He was perhaps one of the hundred in the USSR who had a chance to experience the taste of freedom. This is a true story about the price of freedom for an artist. When the government suspected his intention to emigrate, they strictly limited his concerts abroad and banned him from leaving the country. A year later the violinist died because freedom was his oxygen.

Cholera

A film about memory and love. Fisherman Sergey escapes from his humdrum existence on the empty shores of Lake Onega – where he meets with the ghost of his beloved wife.

Your Rock

The film shows how three rock bands from Yekaterinburg, Russia and their young leaders are looking for their path in music and in life.

Territory

It happened in the sixties, during the political thaw in the Soviet Union... but our story unfolds in the coldest terrain of the country. It was an unexplored and unbeaten terrain of boundless ice-field and forbidding rocks. This was the proper place for real men and real romantics. Our story is about the geologists prospecting gold in the Extreme North.

The Gulls

Elza lives in a small town in the Republic of Kalmykia on the Caspian Sea. Another year comes to an end, it’s cold and the steppe is covered in a thin layer of snow. When her husband, who makes a living from illegal fishing, asks her one night what she did during the day, she lies. She wasn’t at her mother’s, but at the bus stop. She thought of leaving – to find out what it might be to escape the infinite expanse of her dreary small world. But she didn’t dare; instead she stays and withdraws into herself, unconcerned by who might see. One day, her husband doesn’t return from a dangerous boat trip. It is said that a fisherman only returns if he has a woman waiting for him and that seagulls are the souls of the missing. At the start of a somewhat unplanned pregnancy, widowed and alone, Elza wanders ever further through the city, plotting a path between tradition and the contemporary until she’s no longer on familiar ground.

Calculator

Ten prisoners condemned to exile on a hostile planet XT-59 must pave the way through swamp to reach the Islands of Happiness, the only safe area on the planet, before the harsh climate or the underground horrors kill them all.

The Lighthouse

Lena returns to her home in a remote, war-ravaged Armenian village to try and persuade her grandparents to leave with her for safety in Moscow.

Bakshi. The Great Compassion Meditation

A dramatic worldly and spiritual journey of a Buddhist monk from Russia who became one of the first scholars and preachers of Tibetan Buddhism in the USA. In 1923 he left his home and spent over 30 years in Tibet and India. He was a friend of the Dalai Lama and taught at Columbia University. He devoted his life to putting the teachings of Buddha into practice and raising interest in Buddhism in the Western world to a new level.