Alexander Feklistov Movies
- 2001
Two women struggling to renew their friendship discover they're still troubled by the differences that dove them away years before in this drama from Russia. Nina and Ritka were close friends through their teenage years, but when they both fell deeply in love with the same man, it drove a wedge between them and they haven't seen each other in years. Since their youth, Nina has become a successful physician and Ritka a well-known author; one day, Ritka decides out of the blue to pay Nina a visit, and while the two old friends are happy to see one another, it quickly becomes obvious that the jealousies and feelings of betrayal that split them apart have never gone away. Starring Valentina Korotayeva and Evdokiya Germanova, Sobstvennaya Tyen was screened in competition at the 2001 International Women's Film Festival in Creteil, France. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Valentina Korotayeva, Evdokiya Germanova, (more)
- 2000
A woman finds new love, but with the wrong man and at the wrong time, in this drama set in the former Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. Sonya (Vera Alentova) is a 44-year-old woman who is unhappy in her two-decades-old marriage to an author, who is open-minded where Sonya is repressed and guarded. Sonya is a member of a group trying to promote better relations between France and the Soviet Union, and she receives a visit from Bernard (Gerard Depardieu), one of the French committee organizers. Bernard does not speak Russian, so he brings with him an interpreter, Andre (Antoly Lobotsky), a Frenchman living and working in Russia. As Andre speaks to Sonya for Bernard, he finds himself becoming attracted to her, and while Sonya is initially resistant, she soon falls into an affair with Andre. But like Sonya, Andre already has a spouse, and he's due to return to France in a week once his working papers and visa expire, leaving them little time to decide what they should do about their adulterous relationship. Zavist Bogov received its American premiere at the 2000 Chicago Film Festival. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Vera Alentova, Alexander Feklistov, (more)
- 1994
Two disparate people come together in this odd-ball Russian-French black comedy. Seryozha, an ex-convict and Vera, a middle-aged introvert, come together after he steals her purse. They end up on the lam after Seryozha stabs a hostel worker. They end up in an empty village and soon discovered they are in the midst of an area contaminated by radiation. Three bandits also come through and Seryozha puts them into the village hoosegow and proceeds to torture them. When they become allies, he releases them. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Inna Churikova, Igor Sklyar, (more)
- 1994
A wife finds her life transformed after a torrid affair in this story of murder. Katia is a rather dull young woman who types manuscripts for Irina, her husband's mother and successful writer of romance novels. Katia's husband is a real momma's boy. They go to Irina's summer house to work. There Katia encounters the intense and sexy Serguei who creates passionate longings with in her. Overcome she and Serguei engage in vigorous love-making upon a windowsill where Irina sees them. Irina has a weak heart. Quiet Katia, having rediscovered the joys of sex, changes and becomes more assertive and flighty. Serguei quickly loses interest in her. Strange and deadly things begin happening at the summer house which calls the attention of a judge who is extremely familiar with Irina's writing. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Ingeborga Dapkunaite, Alisa Freyndlikh, (more)
- 1994
This Russian-Hungarian backed concept film is set at a giant Siberian steelworks and focuses upon the exploits of one spectacularly bored employee while subtly commenting on larger issues. Conditions at the works, which produces armor alloys for the military, are grim, dangerous, and barely tolerable. The story presents several episodes from workers' lives but focuses particularly upon young Ignat. When not working, his only entertainment stems from stealing sheep from wandering shepherds, and robbing a train at gunpoint. To find a little more excitement, he enters the annual fight between the strongest metal worker and the strongest miner. This provides the film's climax. ~ Sandra Brennan, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Yevgeny Sidikhin, Alexander Kalyagin, (more)
- 1992
In this free-wheeling drama, dozens of little dramas center around an affair between the wife of an NKVD official and a baggage handler she has met. The woman, a former aristocrat, is relatively safe in Moscow in 1930, even though Joseph Stalin is running the country since she is married to a member of his secret police (the NKVD). Her husband's unit has been ordered to train a feisty black stallion for the Red Army commander to ride on parade. Hopeless love and aberrant sexuality seems to be a secondary theme, as one story concerns a lawyer who has fallen in love with his praying-mantis-type client, a woman who kills her bedmates. Another story concerns a poet who has fallen in love with a ballerina who cannot accord his affection the kind of response he desires, which makes him suicidal. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Alexander Feklistov, Ute Lemper, (more)
- 1991
Andrei is buff, he is muscular, he is ready to bash heads whenever and wherever his much-worshipped mother directs, and his gang is similarly buff, similarly ready to follow the lead of Andre's mother. He has lived a life of competition and conflict with true Russian heroes like his father, who he believed died in Afghanistan, and enemies like Jews and foreigners. For him, after his lounge-singing mother, the muscular movie-star Arnold Schwarzenegger is a god. His mother is a piece of work, using her incestuous relationship with her son to motivate him to go off on rampages to satisfy her bile against all "non-Russians." One day she gets drunk and reveals that Andrei's father is not the soldier he always thought he was, but a Jewish composer and conductor. Thinking she has fashioned her son into the perfect instrument for revenge, she tells him how his father seduced her (making her pregnant) and then did not cast her as a singer for an important role, which blighted her career after that. When Andrei looks up his newly revealed father, he finds an impoverished, gentle man who lives in such chaos that a few new holes in the wall, put there in an anti-Semitic rage by the boy, have no effect on him. Instead, he is proud of his newfound son. Before long, the charms of gentleness and civility have won him over, and he realizes that he must protect his father against his mother and his former gang, still loyal to her wishes. In a film-making note, industry insiders said that many of the skinheads in the gangs in this movie were the genuine article, which lent a specially chilling realism to their anti-everybody performances. ~ Clarke Fountain, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Oleg Borisov, Andrei Gutin, (more)
- 1991
- PG13
Andrei Konchalovsky's examination of totalitarianism, and the self-deluded mind-set that allows it to happen, is based on Konchalovsky's meeting with a bureaucratic flunky of Stalin's -- his personal projectionist -- during his early days as a filmmaker. Set during the height of Stalin's rule (1939 through 1953), the story concerns Ivan Sanchin (Tom Hulce), a motion picture projectionist who worships the Soviet leader like a god. He lives in a tiny apartment, sharing his space with a Jewish family. One day, the KGB bursts into the apartment of his Jewish neighbors and carts them away. Later that night, there is a loud banging on his door and standing before him are two KGB agents, who drag him off into the night. While at first Ivan can't understand what he did wrong, it seems the news is good -- Stalin wants Ivan to take over as his official motion picture projectionist. But since his job is high security, he can't tell his wife Anastasia (Lolita Davidovich) what he does for a living. When Anastasia takes an interest in the orphaned child of his former Jewish neighbors, Ivan begins to worry that Anastasia's visits to the state orphanage might have political repercussions against him. When he gets his wife a job serving Stalin's cabinet, he thinks he's solved his political worries. Unfortunately, Anastasia catches the amorous eye of KGB chief Beria (Bob Hoskins), and Ivan's unquestioning faith in the Soviet leaders is sorely tested. ~ Paul Brenner, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Tom Hulce, Lolita Davidovich, (more)
- 1988
Three young sisters enjoy their romp in the woods in this symbolic drama. They prepare for a birthday party for the oldest girl at their grandmother's house. The trio perceives the world outside to be a "garden of desire," but their idyllic splendor is soon disturbed by the initial rumblings of the impending war. The birthday girl has premonitions of disaster, and their beloved father is soon arrested and is never seen again. After a bomb supposedly obliterates everything, two blond children are seen skipping through a cemetery. ~ Dan Pavlides, All Movie Guide
- Starring:
- Marianna Velezheva, Irina Shustaieva, (more)
