Ксения Корнева

KVN is a Russian humour TV show and competition where teams compete by giving funny answers to questions and showing prepared sketches. The programme was first aired by the First Soviet Channel on November 8, 1961. Eleven years later, in 1972, when few programmes were being broadcast live, Soviet censors found the students' impromptu jokes offensive and anti-Soviet and banned KVN. The show was revived fourteen years later during the Perestroika era in 1986, with Alexander Maslyakov as its host. It is one of the longest-running TV programmes on Russian Television. It also has its own holiday on November 8, the birthday of the game, which KVN players celebrate every year since it was announced and widely celebrated for the first time in 2001.

Victor Gromov, once a legend of Moscow’s criminal underworld known under the nickname “Butcher”, has since retired and now spends his days enjoying life on his farm. One day, Victor’s former “colleagues” show up and tell him that he must store the mafia’s common fund in his offshore bank account. Victor has no choice but to help them. Several months later, on the day when he is supposed to give the money back, Victor gets hit on the head by a falling billboard. As a result, he forgets the password to his bank account. Fleeing for his life from his former cronies, Victor decides to hide in a freight train’s boxcar but ends up getting locked inside. The train departs, and several days later he finds himself thousands of kilometers away from Moscow, in a small northern town called Polyarny, which, as it turns out, is not so easy to get out of...

The capital's top manager Dima Korolev has to return to his native Zaleshchinsk ten years later to buy out the local recreation center for the construction of a shopping center. But on the way to the business project will be his ex-girlfriend Alyona and part-time director of the Recreation center, as well as annoying relatives who will remind the ambitious guy of his roots.