Valentina Titova Movies

Tormented by his many high ideals and equally numerous failures to live up to them, an elderly Russian nobleman reminisces about his life while travelling on a ferryboat, as he listens to his fellow passengers telling stories about their religious faith. When he was a boy, he attended a military academy. He was so filled with high ideals and belief in the sacred person of the Tsar even then that he slapped a superior officer who, in his view, had betrayed those ideals. As a man, his troubled conscience led him to follow the monastic ideal and become a priest. However, his sexual urges were so overwhelming, even though they did not cause public trouble, that he shaved his beard and pretended that he never took holy orders. When an affair with a childhood girlfriend offers nothing in the way of consolation, he heads for Siberia, where he serves the peasantry as a teacher and a doctor. This film, commemorating the 150th year after the birth of Count Leo Tolstoy (1828-1910), is based on his last short story. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

A much beloved comedy, Mimino tells the story of a Soviet Georgian helicopter pilot who is called Mimino (Vakhtang Kikabidze), which means "falcon" in that language. He is ambitious to become an international airline pilot and goes to Moscow and, with the help of an old friend, tries to get a job as an international pilot. In his Moscow hotel, he meets Suren, an Armenian, and despite the supposed historical antipathy of Georgians and Armenians, they become friends. They have both pretended to be participants in a seminar on endocrinology in order to get rooms at the hotel where the seminar is being held. He has a lot of wild adventures with Suren, and on his own. Much of the comedy pits ordinary people such as Mimino, who is from the countryside, against the haughty sophisticates of Moscow. Popular Georgian singer Vakhtang Kikabidze, who performs the title role, sang a song within the film which became a Soviet hit. This film won the Grand Prize from the 1978 Moscow International Film Festival, the State Prize of the USSR, and also a prize from the All-Union Film Festival. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi

Near the close of the Russian Civil War, in 1923, a young man begins studying journalism at a worker newspaper and has a series of romantic adventures which cause him to mature swiftly. He rescues a beautiful girl from an abusive family situation, only to lose her to a smooth-talking sharpster the first time he has to leave town on assignment. Another much nicer and more principled girl is really in love with him, but he doesn't know it. This bittersweet coming-of-age story was based on a novel by Vera Panova. ~ Clarke Fountain, Rovi