Independent Film Project

Few not connected novels about the love. Few couples falling in love in different places of post USSR: Moscow, Georgia, Armenia.

Eka and Natia leave their childhood behind and ignore societal customs to escape from their turbulent family lives.

Warsaw, December 13th 1981. Martial law shuts down the country. Overnight, a country turns into a prison. Taxis have been replaced by tanks. Citizens are treated like criminals. And visiting British Professor Joan Andrews finds herself trapped. After witnessing the murder of a young student by the secret police (the "Crows"), Joan herself becomes the target.

In Spring 2022 Masha prepares to leave Russia — her homeland that has changed. It turns into a chain of unexpected farewells: her mom dies of cancer, her lover flees army conscription, everything including her own old self is falling apart. Her way to cope with the grief is to fixate everything with her camera. Her anger guides her to inner emigration to the local underground scene, which became an escape for young russians. This kaleidoscope of shards chronicles not only spirit of the time, but the director’s personality crumbling against the backdrop of global turmoil.

When Sandro’s father decides to devote his life to God and leaves for a monastery, the teenage introvert finds himself deprived of the fundamental certainties of life. Abandoned by his father and his mother, who is working abroad, the young man embarks on a journey of self-discovery, opening up both to a new friendship with the radical Lasha, who has ties with an ultra-right organisation, and also to the chance to explore his own sexuality. George Sikharulidze’s perceptive feature debut considers how fine the line is between the observer and the observed, and asks where contemporary post-Soviet Georgian society is heading as it hovers on the border between religious conservatism and nationalisation on the one hand, and the desire for independence and modernisation on the other. Natalia Kozáková (kviff.com)

Nina, an OB-GYN, faces accusations after newborn's death. Her life undergoes scrutiny during investigation. She persists in her medical duties, determined to provide care others hesitate to offer, despite risks.

A middle-aged, unemployed heroin-addict, Checkie, loiters on the Tbilisi street outside his son’s school, where he himself was once a promising student. His wife, meanwhile, struggles to pay the tuition and understand her husband’s lack of interest in the family’s survival—even as the bank repossesses their furniture. But when a group of policemen blackmails Checkie into entrapping the son of his wealthy friend, husband and wife are unified by the uncertainty of their deepening moral dilemma, and a series of worsening foul-ups, in Levan Koguashvili’s lightly humorous yet realistic drama about the fate of a generation left behind in Georgia’s post-Soviet era.

A big Russian city- not necessarily Moscow, but the kind that is bustling with all types of life including criminal so the police are not without business. A young agent by the name of Nikolay, whose ancestors on his mother's side are Georgian, walks into the department which is busy with the investigation of a murder committed by a mysterious blind killer. His intuition leads him to a group of people whose destiny was broken by the Chechen War. This peaceful town finds its sinister inside, and Nikolay's noble impulses runs into the cruel and corrupt reality.

The end of the Soviet empire. The General Secretary lies in the government clinic. He is old and frail, but has a tight grip on power. "The power is only taken, it is never given away," he repeats. And it is convenient for both the elites and the secret services -- while the "body" is alive, various groups are scoring their political points. The General Secretary is "sentenced to life". A young nurse Sasha looks after him. Small, fragile and invisible, she bears a heavy burden of responsibility for the life of the country's top official. Meanwhile, the old man is waging a war in Afghanistan, has a nuclear button and can take the entire world to the grave with him.

From odd situations to complicated emotions, various obstacles test a group of people in their pursuits of true love in this collection of stories.

A diminutive twentysomething 'Soso' (a nickname given to him by his mother) leads a group of revolutionaries in a massive bank heist to rob the Imperial Bank in 1907 Tbilisi. In the process, Soso becomes the man known as Joseph Stalin.

Years after being cast out for being gay by his traditional Mexican father, Paul dying of AIDS returns home to spend his last remaining moments with his family.

The Soviet Union has collapsed. Civil and ethnic wars have broken out in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Armenia, three republics in the Caucasus. The post-Soviet Caucasus have turned into one large conflict zone. Two radically different people with different ideals, problems, and goals are united by the conflict zone. Gogliko, a Tbilisi street boy, and Spartak, a Sukhumi sniper, are forced to solve problems of the street and problems of the state together. For one, the goal is to get back the money he lost gambling; for the other, it is to carry out a general's absurd military mission. In spite of it all, their paths cross and their lives are changed forever.

The House of Joy is a documentary about the creation of the film musical Keto and Kote, which was called the Georgian movie of the twentieth century. It reveals how the film was made, despite the strict censorship of the Stalin's regime.

Farmer Ivan Dunaev gets up early. He feeds his piglets, does paperwork, fixes the tractor, and weighs the meat he'll take in his old pickup truck to the market to sell. He has a wife, a teenage daughter, and a young son. And he loves to hunt. His world revolves around these things. Then, one day, two new workers, Lyuba and Raya, on work release from the local prison colony, arrive on the farm. Ivan doesn't notice it at first, but something begins to change.

Svetlana Parshina was deeply moved by her childhood reading of Twenty Letters to a Friend by Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin's daughter. Years later, learning that the now 82-year-old was living incognito in a Madison, Wisconsin retirement home, Parshina phones and requests an interview. After repeated denials, and only after insisting upon certain conditions, the now-82-year-old Alliluyeva finally consents to a rare filmed interview in which she discusses her education, marriages, her children, the development of her own humanistic philosophy, her CIA-assisted defection to the U.S., and her skeptical views on the competing Cold War ideologies. In more intimate moments, she discusses her childhood, her nanny, the suicide of her mother, her brothers Vasily and Yakov (who died in a Nazi concentration camp) and, of course, her famous father, who most Soviets saw as "a living God."

Rene Dadiani, a big city dweller, teaches video art in a film school, while at the same time working for a propane delivery office. He claims real men are men of many hats. In film school, he's one of the avid preachers of self-initiated absurd theory. He assumes that one can enhance the power of imagination by way of altering consciousness that, on its turn, can give way to new reality. Rene often observes life via his Handycam. Sometimes those he captures are not only the 'real' people, but imaginary personalities, too.

A film with parallel editing tells a story about two young people from Tbilisi. The action takes place on one frosty day in winter. Zaza is a writer, Mamuka is a criminal. They do not know each other. One is driven by a wish to take revenge; the other is driven by love and chivalry. Both are mistaken, as their ambitious decisions resemble a game with fate... Will their roads cross?...

Meet A 105-year-old Olga Markovna Kolyadenko, a former Bolshoi theater opera singer and the only remaining student of director Konstantin Stanislavsky. She still teaches vocals in her Moscow apartment. Konstantin Stanislavsky, who taught Olga Kolyadenko, created the famous acting system that was later adapted in the USA by Lee Strasberg.