Laura Pitskhelauri

A ten-year-old orphan gets adopted by a man pursued by the Mob. After surviving a hit man's attack, by a strange twist of circumstances the new foster father now has the would-be-killer's appearance, that of his son's biological dad.

In the near future, writer Victor Banev gets himself on a UN commission to investigate the goings-on in the remote town of Tashlinsk, where reports tell of a virus-created race of brainiac mutants. His tween daughter Ira is enrolled at a school for gifted children which has been taken over by the mutants, who have grown to despise ordinary humanity.

A re-imagination of Japanese Emperor Hirohito’s final days in power as WWII draws to a close.

For its creators, this film became, in a sense, a labor of love and duty. *Yuri Butusov: Drums Within* is a film about the director’s talent, his confrontation with reality, his mission, and love. Those featured in the film—Butusov’s students, actors who worked with him, his former classmates, close associates, and his "gang"—were unanimous: knowing and working with him was never, and could never have been, just another project. He changed the people he met and transformed the space around him; he would stir things up and create a swell of energy—making the whole cauldron boil. Yet, often enough, he himself found himself powerless against that very tide. Making a film about such a man—avoiding the trap of turning him into a monument and ensuring the result was anything but banal—was a formidable challenge for the filmmakers. They worked on the project for over a year, gathering a wealth of rare archival material and interviewing dozens of people.

He is the genius of industrial espionage. She is a Chinese. She has nothing, she does not even have a name. They love each other madly, but they belong to the system. Go away from the system can only be to the madhouse, or to the grave.

Somewhere in the Urals, between the European and the Asian parts of Russia, there is a stele called "Europe-Asia". Professional swindlers have taken a liking to this place. For several days in a row a wedding is taking place by the roadside. They hide under the veil of the bride, in the costumes of the groom and witnesses, cynically taking in turn every traveler. Fraudsters "spin" the travelers for cash gifts to the newlyweds, generously feeding the guests with diluted alcohol. Under the guidance of the "mother of the bride" the group plays out incredibly funny criminal plays, and their spectators, accomplices and victims are PR people and political technologists, Chinese and Hungarians, policemen and bandits, beggar nomad children and, of course, foreign tourists nostalgic for the once abandoned Russia....