Vladimir Tarasov

In 1973, Leonid Samuilovich flees the USSR and lands a job at the BBC in London. Five years later, radio host Alexei Leonidov starts releasing clandestine recordings smuggled from totalitarian countries via intricate cloak-and-dagger operations. Today, 86-year-old music producer Leo Feigin sits on top of over 30.000 LPs, contemplating on the meaning of his work amidst the grim outlook of new Iron Curtains. Leo Records is a symbol of musical resistance against authoritarian regimes and a pioneer of what we now know as avant-garde.

In Kyiv, the war still seems inconceivable, but the pandemic forces a mother and her daughter to spend the lockdown in their shared apartment. The mother is a piano teacher who keeps giving lessons on the phone, on her kitchen table, with the same passion and perfectionism. Her daughter has an art studio at the other end of the apartment, yet she has swapped her paintbrushes for a camera. Ptitsa: a bird, in Russian, like those who brave winter on snow-covered windowsills.

An unemployed American gets a job in a shooting gallery as a live target. The greedy capitalist owner charges patrons double for the chance to shoot at a human being.

An eight-minute Russian animation directed by Andrey Svislotskiy of Pilot Animation Studio LOOSELY based on the novel Poliphilo's Strife of Love in a Dream or The Dream of Poliphilus.

Mikhail Kulakov, the protagonist of the film, is a prominent figure of the Russian unofficial art scene of the 50s-60s. He was an abstractionist, a tachiste, a participant in the first underground expositions. He lived and worked at great extremes, advocating the idea of freedom as the supreme value.

“Oh, it’s heavy, The stony grip of his right hand!” Alexander Pushkin “The Little Tragedies” * The key figure of the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917 in Russia was Lenin. After his death in 1924 Lenin’s image was immortalized in countless numbers of monuments in the Soviet Union and in the Soviet bloc’s countries. In her film, the artist refers to depicted in stone image of the Revolution leader based on archival materials and found footage. There is neither living nor dead Lenin in the film; only “the stone guest” become ingrained in Soviet people lives after his death.

The once exemplary livestock and dairy farm in the Altai region is now declining. Milk cows live here. Their whole life passes between the barn and the "maternity ward". Everything here is subordinated to the task of obtaining a useful product. All days at the farm have the same schedule: morning milking, evening milking, “maternity ward”, dairy. The milkmaids arrive early, when it is still dark. People come into the space inhabited by cows, combining animals and mechanisms, creating hybrids of cows with mechanical udders. In the evening, the milkmaids come and milk the cows again. The milk is transported to the dairy section and from there, it leaves the farm. Calves are born in the “maternity ward”, where cows can temporarily return to their natural life. Several women perform these extremely hard and low-paid jobs to keep the barn alive. This is life on a farm.

Animators from the distant future fly to another planet to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Soviet animation. Once in a meteor shower, the spaceship makes an emergency landing on an unknown planet, where live monsters with the ability to transform. Unknown formless creatures attack the ship and take away all things from there, along with films on which were recorded cartoons for display. While watching the collection of the best Soviet cartoons, monsters, being very impressed by what they saw, turn into cartoon characters, after which they decide to make peace with people and help them get everything back in place.