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© 2026 The Couch Critic
Browse 82 movies from M. Razbezhkina and M. Ugarov Academy
A provincial Russian family killed off by suicide, murder and manslaughter and a boy who asks about guilt and forgiveness in the midst of all this squalor. Shockingly great.
Sep 2011
Viktor Ryzhakov takes charge of the Sovremennik theatre after the death of Galina Volchek, who led the troupe for almost half a century and enjoyed absolute authority. For the theatre’s first new production, the new artistic director chooses a play about a family whose members have ceased to understand each other. While working on the play, the director and actors become more and more like the characters in the future production, and find it increasingly difficult to find mutual understanding within their “theatrical family.”
Oct 2023
Fly-on-the-wall documentary on the day-to-day life of Evgeniy Alyokhin, russian poet and musician, and his girlfrend Oksana.
Dec 2012
The demonstrators on the streets of Moscow in July 2019 want just one thing: fair elections. Despite their peaceful protest, 2,700 activists are arrested and hundreds are injured. The active camera places the viewer at the heart of the demonstrations, among the pushing and shoving of the chanting crowds. “You should be protecting us!” shouts a young woman at a soldier, and two big men come and take her away.
Nov 2021
Ten director graduates from Marina Razbezhkina’s School of Documentary Film and Documentary Theatre lived with a camera for two months in order to chronicle the last “Russian winter” and its popular uprising against Vladimir Putin’s presidential run. People, faces, conversations, protests, failures and triumphs come together to chronicle the campaign.
Aug 2012
Nikita Yefimov brings his camera into a Russian high-security detention centre. The head of the penitentiary department offers to personally enact moments from prison life to control its image.
Apr 2021
Russian photographer Maksim Dmitriev liked reality, and in the beginning of the 20 century, he photographed bums, workers, farmers, bankers, and monks. Hundred yours later we showed these photographs to nowadays heroes. And they recognized each other.
Oct 2013
The Chechen Ruslan Arsajev seizes every opportunity to fight against the Russians, including in Ukraine. A portrait of a displaced mercenary from the front line of the crisis.
Nov 2015
Two people are on the road. Everyday life, business calls, games, a curve of the highway, a swing and again business calls... During this year the father and the daughter have not seen much of each other and they have not been alone for a long time. Two cameras are looking face to face; different fears inhabit one and the same space. There is a question: should they come back or should they continue traveling together?
Jun 2014
Susanna, a sixty-four year old actress, lives with her mother and for a long time hasn’t played in the theatre; only occasionally she appears at small venues with poetic concert programs. But she is haunted by the play, which she rehearsed more than twenty years ago, and which was never staged. She finds a partner; the only thing that remains is to find a theatre that will agree to produce the play.
Aug 2010
In the circus tent „Joy” the same thing happens every day – they dismantle and assemble the tent with a dome full of stars, give performances, and move on to the next place. Lynx and parrot trainers quarrel over every little thing, and Valera the clown always performs alone. Until one day a new partner joins him, the clown Yana, and he starts to dream about conquering the world of the circus together with her.
Oct 2020
They say that if a daughter looks like a father, then she will certainly be happy. But what if you look like a person whom you have never seen in your life? And all you know about him is speculation, fantasy and a small bronze figure.
Dec 2019
Тrue Kazakh girls don’t marry Russians. This is what grandma Zeinegul believes in. But her beloved granddaughter disobeyed her will. Many years later the girl comes back to Kazakhstan. Her mother drinks, her grandma prays, her father got married again, but she wants to take a picture of her whole family, just like the one they took years ago when she was a child. The picture of the family she loves and hates so much.
Sep 2018
Varya is sixteen. Varya doesn't go to school. Varya asks that she be called Sasha. Varya has a goal - to go to St. Petersburg. She plays the violin in the train, earning a trip. But the trip of a dream turns out to be a dangerous adventure, in which everything goes not according to plan...
Jun 2017
In this documentary, we are not going to discover anything about the eponymous musical genre, but instead we will meet a group of workers dismantling a high-rise building made of concrete and metal. The filmmakers observe and register their labour using ingenious, visually stunning images, sometimes joined into several composition plans.
Oct 2018
"Ata" is translated from Kazakh as "grandfather". The story of the 80-year-old blind grandfather was filmed in the south of Kazakhstan.
Jun 2011
The documentary follows the life of Farroukh, a young Tajik immigrant who lives in Moscow outskirts with his family and does odd jobs in dreams of becoming an actor.
Dec 2015
Everyone has their own buzz. For him, the high is war. He was in love with the war as a woman, and the feelings did not go away. He can't go back into battle. All he has now is the house of mercy, the monastery on the next street, and the desire to start a different life.
Dec 2020
In a small village on the slopes of the former coal mines, Oleg Pavlov, the father of many children, screens the "Little Prince" of Exupery. The camera is the cheapest, bought for retirement. In the roles - Oleg and his four children. Two years of filming and editing - and journalists from all over Russia are on a visit to an amazing creative and friendly family. But the family never calls his father at the table. Children refuse to go to the premiere of the film. And Oleg himself does not go to spend the eldest daughter, when she leaves to live in another city. He just sleeps. And no one wakes him up.
In the event of natural disaster, turn off electricity and gas, hide your valuable objects, lock the house, climb onto the roof, and maybe you will survive. Natasha, 12 years old, knows these instructions by heart. So, while waiting for the storm, she laughs and fights, suffers heartbreak, attempts to negotiate the purchase of a new swimsuit with her father. With zest and delicacy, with clear complicity with the body of her young heroine, Elizaveta Kozlova captures the details of a day-to- day life which, although ordinary, never seems insipid, so deeply is it infused with the contagious energy of the protagonist. And as the lines of contemporary Russian society and its problems are sketched out, In the Eye of the Storm reveals itself as the portrait of a character undergoing tremendous change.
Dec 2016