Yaroslava Pulinovich

This is a collection of portraits: 23 short stories about the Mari women, a sort of Decameron suspended between magic and realism, in which the Autonomous Republic of the Marij El serves as a backdrop for the collective history of a people of ancient tradition. A journey into a mysterious and unknown part of the world.

Five friends – a poet, an actor, a painter, an architect and a primitivist film director – are five red avant-garde artists who try to find the embodiment of their hopes and dreams in the young Soviet state. The Revolution is boiling up like a bottle with apple cider: winged service dogs and heart-shaped potatoes, dead Semashko, the People’s Commissar for Health, and cheerful angels, love for the Tsar and love for the young secretary Annushka, executions and pregnancies – everything is interlaced and inseparable!

Created under a 'manifesto' whose directives would make Lars von Trier shudder, an anthology is presented that might look on paper like an exercise in forced hipness. Fortunately, its creators – Harmony Korine (USA), Alexsei Fedorchenko (Russia) and Jan Kwiecinski (Poland) – prove innovative and just insane enough to make an exhilarating experiment.

1943 year. Alma-Ata. The hero of the film is a young Michurin fruit grower who revives a medicinal apple variety and investigates a strange crime. The script was written based on the book by Mikhail Zoshchenko "Before the Sunrise".