Viktor Kosakovsky - Sreda AKA Wednesday (1997)

Quote:
Wednesday, July 19, 1961: it’s summertime and the newspapers are full of the usual articles. The world is comfortably embedded in the Cold War. An average day in Leningrad. 51 girls and 50 boys are born in Leningrad on this day.
One of them is Victor Kossakovsky. Why here and not somewhere else? Why then and not another time? These questions are the starting point for his film. Could it be that this child was mistaken for another in hospital? Who are all the people who began their lives on that same day? Do they somehow share the same fate or are they merely contemporaries?

Don Askarian - Avetik (1992)

"Avetik" is very much in tradition of the cinema of dreams. A gorgeous and mesmerizing film, "Avetik" both thrills the eye and boggles the mind. It takes you on a journey of the mind that leads to heaven or hell - a succulent garden full of bare-breasted goddesses or a frozen step of devastation and death". "Askarian is capable of producing images that are unlike anything ever seen before, yet hit you with a primal immediacy".Hovering between the realms of poetry and history, this stunningly photographed, elegiac work-hot mostly in long takes-mixes cryptic metaphor and fantastic symbolism to tell the story of Avetik, an Armenian filmmaker exiled in Berlin. Director Askarian employs dreamlike images-a crumbling, ancient stone chapel gradually reduced to nothing by the rumbling vibrations of passing military vehicles; a ghostly cemetery of carved tombstones in which a woman takes a starving sheep in her arm and breast-feeds it back to life-to reflect the history of his homeland and shades of his own exile in Germany. In sensuous, lyric tableaux, Askarian explores German racism, the 1915 Armenian genocide, the disastrous earthquake of 1989, tranquil childhood memories, and images inspired by erotic medieval poetry.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Dukhovnye golosa. Iz dnevnikov voyny. Povestvovanie v pyati chastyakh aka Spiritual Voices (1995)

Quote:
The film develops as the author’s diary, where unbiased narration is dissolved in the lyrical intonation. You watch the real persons in the particular circumstances on the screen. They are Russian frontier–guards on the Tadjik–Afghani border. But it is also a piece of art, where aesthetic laws give the theme and arrange the facts taken from life.

That is why the film begins with the story about Mozart, about death concealing under the poor cover of the daily routine, about music, breaking through this cover and absorbing spiritual voices of the Universe. And that's why the northern landscape is being shown during a long while, motionless and at the same time subtly changing.

Aleksandr Sokurov – Vostochnaya elegiya AKA Oriental Elegy (1996)

Quote:
Oriental Elegy (1996). Visually impressionistic, atmospherically dense, and narratively opaque, Oriental Elegy is the surreal journey of a displaced spirit (Aleksandr Sokurov) as he wanders in the interminable darkness through the temporal landscape of a quaint and isolated feudal-era fishing village. Guided by a series of faintly illuminated rooms, the wandering spirit comes upon ancient souls who take on physical forms as they recount their personal stories of daily existence, loss, and tragedy in the peasant community. Intrigued by his initial visit to a curiously distracted elderly woman, the spirit returns to her home in order to ask a fundamental question - "What is happiness?" - an existential query that is innocently answered with innate humility and accepted unknowingness. Through abstractly textured imagery and indelibly hypnotic dreamscapes, Sokurov composes a metaphoric, sensual, and evocative tone poem on a soul's search for enlightenment and the essential survival of human consciousness.

Kira Muratova - Lyst do Ameryky AKA Letter To America (1999)

Description: The short is made in a typical Muratova style that merges surrealism and reality into a mesmerizing act full of understatement and metaphor.

Some trivia: this is nominally Muratova's first short. However, she herself considers it her fourth - she prefers to think of her Three Stories as three short films instead of a single feature.

The film was made with no budget whatsoever - all Muratova was given were the camera and the film stock. None of the actors were paid. The rumor has it that the film was shot in Muratova's own apartment.

Kira Muratova - Uvlecheniya AKA Passions (1994)

Michael Atkinson:

Passions (1994) has a slightly different program: Accompany a pack of extroverted, sub-Fellini nutlogs to a horse farm, where they prance, vamp, and blabber about horses, love, and life. "It's like somebody nudges me and whispers: Ask them—will they bear it?" one character says, summarizing Muratova's strategy. Photographed in uncharacteristically lush colors, Passions won an indulgent Russian Oscar.

Sergei Loznitsa - Polustanok aka Train Stop (2000)

Trains travel through the night without stopping. The clatter of the carriages quickly disappears, along with the wail of the locomotive. The people at the station are all asleep. But why are they so exhausted ? And what are they waiting for?

Sergei Loznitsa - Zhizn, osin AKA Life, Autumn (1999)

Quote:
What first appear to be photographs of elderly Russian peasants and farmers, becomes an evocative meditation on old Russia and new, a snapshot of a disappearing way of life. As they stand in their work clothes, often with tools by their side, looking into the camera, this remarkable film with poetic rigor, captures a people, a world, that is quickly vanishing.

Quote:
So wird aus alltäglichem eine ergreifende Wirkung erzielt, teilt sich der Lebensrhythmus, die Geschichte eines Volkes mit Wärme. Lakonie und Humor mit 'Leben, Herbst' schafft es in einer Kürze alle großen Fragen des menschlichen Lebens zu thematisieren und findet damit, Kulturen übergreifend, einen gemeinsamen Nenner. [MDR Kultur]

Nikita Mikhalkov - Utomlyonnye solntsem AKA Burnt By The Sun (1994)

Review
By the early '90s, it was finally possible for filmmakers working in the former Soviet Union to deal honestly with the horrors of the 1930s, when Stalin and his regime "reassessed" the contributions of many heroes of the Revolution, resulting in mass imprisonments and death for many millions. Nikita Mikhalkov's brilliant film about those dark days is ironically set at a sunny summer retreat where Serguei Petrovich Kotov (Mikhalkov), an officer who has been honored for his contributions to the success of the state, and his family are enjoying an idyllic summer's day. The film's deliberate pacing for a full half-hour (we might think we're watching the Russian equivalent of Renoir's Partie De Campagne) lulls the viewer into a false sense of serenity. When Dimitri, an old lover of Kotov's young wife and now a government official, arrives, Mikhalkov allows our suspicion that Dimitri's visit isn't merely personal to accumulate slowly. The film flirts with sentimentality, especially in casting Mikhalkov's real-life daughter as Kotov's irresistibly cute little girl, but after all, the filmmaker's goal is to show the toll that a repressive political regime can exact on the lives of individual citizens. (AMG)

Aleksandr Sokurov - Tikhiye stranitsy aka Whispering Pages (1993)

Quote:
'Whispering Pages' may be the most dimly lit film ever made. Set to the strains of Mahler, this 1993 film takes place in a city whose streets are rarely penetrated by sunlight. Look hard enough and you'll discover the world of Dostoevsky, whose Crime and Punishment is the source of whatever scant plot exists in Whispering Pages.

Sokurov is one of the most painterly filmmakers alive, but he's seldom interested in conventionally pretty imagery (or conveying the same grandeur sought by his former mentor, Andrei Tarkovsky). Instead, Sokurov's images often seem flat and hollow, with the movie screen's two-dimensionality emphasized rather than disguised. Some of the images in the shadowy Whispering Pages -- like the wizened bureaucrat who covers his face with his newspaper or the prostitutes who wrestle in the street -- might as well have been made from woodcuts.

Ron Holloway - Paradjanov: A Requiem (1994)

The film shows the unique world of artist Sergei Parajanov, whose brilliant images in films and collages aroused the suspicion of Soviet authorities. Unexpectedly, this last all-embracing interview, given at the 1988 München Film Festival, has become a film legacy.

Sergei Parajanov was born an Armenian in Georgia. He studied at the Moscow Film School and worked as a director in the Ukraine. His stylistic vitality and “plasticism” - a term he used to describe his films - enabled him to creative universal images.

Aleksandr Sokurov - The Dialogues with Solzhenitsyn (1999)

This is a two-part video portrait of the outstanding Russian writer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, author of famous novels about the Russian revolution and the acclaimed study of the Soviet concentration camps, "The Gulag Archipelago". Solzhenitsyn is of more interest to the filmmaker for his attitudes, thoughts and present life, than for his legendary past. Rather than interviewing some important person, Sokurov creates a monumental image before our eyes.

This remarkable portrait shows us the inner world of this great author whilst his outer world is seen merely through several visual landscapes: park, study, library, and the room in which the writer’s wife work.

Nikita Mikhalkov - Urga (Урга) AKA Territory Of Love (1991)

Plot Synopsis by Michael Betzold

Veteran Russian writer-director Nikita Mikhalkov's film about the impact of modern civilization on an idyllic part of Mongolia won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival and was nominated for an Oscar as Best Foreign Film. A farmer (Bayyartu) and his wife, who live in a rural part of Inner Mongolia, have three children. Chinese population control policies prevent them from having any more. The farmer sets out for the nearest town to obtain birth control. He comes upon a Russian truck driver (Vladimir Gostyukhin) who has ended up in a lake. The farmer takes the man back to his farm, and after initially being appalled at the lack of civilization, the Russian becomes enchanted with the peaceful life of the backwards countryside and decides to stay. But his presence presages big changes for the peasants.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Mat i syn AKA Mother and Son(1997)

Quote:
In festival circles, Russian director Alexander Sokurov has long been dubbed the next Andrei Tarkovsky (Solaris, Andrei Rublev), but Mother And Son, his 14th feature, is his first to attract much attention in the U.S. Given the stubborn pacing of the film—which makes everything the famously deliberate Tarkovsky directed look like The Cannonball Run by comparison—it's hardly surprising that distributors have balked in the past. But once you adjust to Sokurov's spare effects and measured cutting, the haunting, unforgettable images in Mother And Son leave no doubt as to why he's considered one of the world's premier film artists. The clean-lined, economical story concerns an anguished young man (the sad-eyed Alexi Ananishnov) so devoted to his dying mother (Gunrun Geyer) that he refuses to accept the inevitable. Isolated from the rest of society, save for the occasional train passing in the distance, he spends long days carrying her across the idyllic landscape outside their cottage, stalling frequently from the burden. There are times when the action stalls in turn, as Sokurov wipes away the already scant dialogue and movement and the film becomes more like an especially vibrant painting. Using special, hand-painted filters and distorting lenses that flatten the characters against their surroundings (and each other), Sokurov creates a hazy, muted visual texture that lends his melancholy story uncommon intimacy and power. Some have found this cinematic museum piece interminably dull, but for those willing to ride out its eccentricities, Mother And Son is a unique, rewarding experience.

Nikita Mikhalkov - Sibirskiy tsiryulnik aka The Barber Of Siberia [+Extras] (1998)

Richard Harris stars as a foreign entrepreneur, who ventures to Russia in 1885 with dreams of selling a new, experimental steam-driven timber harvester in the wilds of Siberia. Julia Ormond portrays his assistant, who falls in love with a young Russian officer, played by Russian star Oleg Menshikov, and spends the next 10 years perfecting the harvester and pursuing her love, who has been exiled to Siberia.

Aleksei Balabanov - Pro urodov i lyudey AKA Of Freaks And Men (1998)

IMDB:
Dariya the maid getting a boy to touch her large breast is just one incident that occurs when Yohan and Victor infiltrate two families, forcing young Liza and blind Ekaterina to appear in porn, but they are not so innocent themselves.