Preserving the text of the play, the amazing dialogues, the brilliant characters, we have transposed the action into today’s Russian provinces and changed only one thing: the age of the heroes. In Anton Chekhov’s play the heroines are aged around 25; now they are 55. What does that do? The heroes’ retorts, stylistically inappropriate from today’s twenty-year-olds, are absolutely organic for the older generation, the ‘Soviet’ intelligentsia. The problems of Chekhov’s classical work concerning the search for a meaning in life, the loss of ideals, the fear before death without having achieved anything in the world, the desire to be useful to others – all these things are also a typical attribute of the Soviet intelligentsia.

Filipino-born Ella works as a nanny in a prosperous Moscow family. Day by day, she carries out the same routine actions: washing, cooking, cleaning, babysitting. But once she accidentally hurts her arm, her smooth repetitive life gradually gives a lurch…

Surreal worlds, elegiac images and romantic letters form a stream of suppressed memories. A young man discovers diaries and film reels of his recently deceased mother. Ukrainian director Igor Minaev melts his rarely seen shorts from Soviet times into an emotional journey into the past.

In a small, poor town, a young worker falls in love with an actress from a traveling theater troupe and tries to keep her close, dreaming and working hard to rebuild a new town while the troupe increasingly faces decline and the end of its run.

The main character has difficulties with a beautiful young wife. And at this moment he meets a friend of his youth, whom he has not seen for 20 years. His daughter helps him to arrange his happiness and is happy herself, because now she has two beloved and loving mothers. And all these adventures involve the magical spirit of the New Year, when everyone must be happy.

Although he is only eighteen, twenty-year-old Nadia permits Sergei to move into her apartment and share her bed. However, his callowness swiftly bores her, and she is unable to hide her increasing disdain for him. Understandably, this is a matter of some distress for him. Her contempt is more difficult for him to bear than she suspects, and one day he is provoked to murder her.

Marusi's father dies on the operating table, and from that moment her life has changed dramatically. In search of work, the girl meets Alexei and his cousin Kostya. Both young men are not indifferent to Marusa - now she has to make a difficult choice. She still does not know that Kostya is the very doctor who unsuccessfully operated on her father.

The thirties, the heyday of Soviet film production. The story of the famed couple's glory — a filmmaker and actress, behind the external well-being of which were hidden strange contradictory relationships and a sense of fear that they carried through their whole lives. The prologue to this story is the 85th anniversary of Lidiya Polyakova, the formerly brightest star in Soviet cinema, who played the main role in all the films of her own husband, director Konstantin Dalmatov. Now in the courtyard there are other times, Dalmatov’s movies are called ideological agitation, and the director himself and his wife are hiding from the world in the country, trying not to let anyone in.

On New Year’s Eve, former rock singer turned respectable housewife Vera Pavlovskaya is preparing to spend the night alone. Her husband, a celebrated film director, claims he’s busy with reshoots—but in truth, he’s run off to his young mistress. Meanwhile, well-known journalist Stefania (or Fanya) faces the prospect of ringing in the holiday with the parents of her sweet but unloved fiancé, Petya. Architect Sergey Skvortsov boards a flight from St. Petersburg to Moscow, eager to reunite with his fiancée Laura. And young librarian Bronislava, also from St. Petersburg, dreams of winning the heart of Oleg—Vera and Sergey’s son—even though he’s happily married. But as New Year’s chaos and confusion take over, none of these plans go quite as expected.