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.

Oleg Bondarev - Machekha AKA The Stepmother (1973)

Based on a story by Mariya Khalfina. Shura Olevantseva leads a happy life with her children and her loving husband Pavel. One day she hears the news that the woman, who once loved her husband, died and that Sveta, Pavel's daughter about whom he knew nothing, is now an orphan. It wasn't easy for Shura to welcome Sveta into her home. It was even more difficult to win her heart, and to give her back the joy of childhood and the belief that she's not alone. Written by russart.com

Donatella Baglivo - Tarkovsky's Cinema + Interviews (1987)

Broadcast on BBC2 Arena, 13 March 1987. Contains interview footage with Tarkovsky as he discusses each of his seven major films. He also talks about his world-view and
his philosophy of filmmaking. The film also includes footage of a Tarkovsky lecture to
young film students in which he expresses his thoughts on modern cinema.

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.

Boris Barnet & S. Mardanin - U samogo sinego morya AKA By the Bluest of Seas (1936)

Synopsis:
The sea is at first quite dark for the sailors Aliosha and Yussuf. Adrift, they reach an island where they meet Mashenka, a beautiful girl they both immediately fall in love with...

seagullfilms.com

One of the films revered by French filmmakers such as Godard and Otar Iosseliani, this marvelous picture, a spontaneous and joyful romantic comedy shot at eye-popping locations, stars the delicious Elena Kouzmina as a bouncy island beauty wooed by two young shipwrecked Caspian fisherman. And it's more fun than Alexander Nevsky.

Larisa Shepitko - Ty i ya AKA You and Me (1971)

Peter, a former medical scientist, suddenly quits his cushy job as a doctor at the Russian Embassy in Sweden and returns to Moscow. 3 years ago his team stood on the threshold of a vital break-through in neurosurgery, but the experimental work was cut short when Peter left for Stockholm. Peter tries to pick up the threads of his old life, fails and runs still further away, to a small town in Northern Russia where he takes a job as a district doctor. But the past would not relinquish its hold on him even there.

Aleksandr Sokurov - Krug vtoroy AKA The Second Circle (1990)

Quote:
A solitary figure trudges through the inclement weather of a vast, remote Siberian wilderness. An unyielding gust of wind brings the young man (Pyotr Aleksandrov) to his knees as he attempts to avert the caustic, sustained force of the snowstorm, momentarily obscuring him from view, erased from the harsh and desolate landscape. The stark, monochromatic image of the film then cuts to an ironically appropriate impersonal and nondescript official title sequence, as the premature sound of a knock on a door seemingly intrudes on the necessity to present information on the film's certification. It is a subtle reminder of life's evolving process: the intrusive nature and unexpected inevitability of death. The film reopens to a jarring, oddly lit image of the gaunt young man standing by the foot of his father's bed in a cramped and squalid apartment. The dispatched medical technicians dispassionately confirm his father's death from natural causes, but explain that they cannot issue a death certificate, pragmatically remarking "You should have placed him in a hospital. Everything would have been easier then." Left alone in theapartment, the son compassionately observes his father's inanimate countenance before preparing his father's body for burial: selecting his best suit, bathing him in the snow in the absence of running water in the apartment, transporting his father's body to the outpatient clinic for a death certificate examination. Without knowing the actual cause of death, the doctor suggests a beaurocratically expedient determination of cancer, rationalizing that "now everything is considered cancer." Having been issued a death certificate, the son then meets with the undertaker (Nadezhda Rodnova), an abrasive and insensitive businesswoman who is quick to assess the family's limited means and treats the overwhelmed young man with disrespect and open hostility, especially as the financially strapped son begins to question some ancillary costs included in the itemized funeral bill. As the dutiful son continues to encounter emotional isolation, antipathy, and an impersonal commodification of the burial process, can he restore the sanctity of the ritual and retain the dignity of his beloved father's memory?

Andrei Tarkovsky - Andrey Rublyov (1966)

Quote:
Widely recognized as a masterpiece, Andrei Tarkovsky's 205-minute medieval epic, based on the life of the Russian monk and icon painter, was not seen as the director intended it until its re-release over twenty years after its completion. The film was not screened publicly in its own country (and then only in an abridged form) until 1972, three years after winning the International Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. Calling the film frightening, obscure, and unhistorical, Soviet authorities edited the picture on several occasions, removing as much as an entire hour from the original.

Presented as a tableaux of seven sections in black and white, with a final montage of Rublev's painted icons in color, the film takes an unflinching gaze at medieval Russia during the first quarter of the 15th century, a period of Mongol-Tartar invasion and growing Christian influence. Commissioned to paint the interior of the Vladimir cathedral, Andrei Rublev (Anatoli Solonitsyn) leaves the Andronnikov monastery with an entourage of monks and assistants, witnessing in his travels the degradations befalling his fellow Russians, including pillage, oppression from tyrants and Mongols, torture, rape, and plague. Faced with the brutalities of the world outside the religious enclave, Rublev's faith is shaken, prompting him to question the uses or even possibility of art in a degraded world. After Mongols sack the city of Vladimir, burning the very cathedral that he has been commissioned to paint, Rublev takes a vow of silence and withdraws completely, removing himself to the hermetic confines of the monastery.