Two families are trying to fix their problems during the celebration of the New Year.

Based on real events... A young married couple from Soviet Union - ice skater and a professional athlete - both are in New York. He is asking for asylum - so his wife must make a choice: return home or stay with her husband ...

When the British, wanting to surprise the Emperor Alexander Pavlovich, presented a clockwork miracle flea, they did not know into the hands of which craftsman it would fall on Russian soil.

A story of a Moscow's apartment building that is slowly falling apart, literally. First, the hot water has been cut off by an old man from Asia, who could not stand it being wasted. Then the roof is starting to collapse. Finally, the electricity has been cut off. All the tenants of the building, no matter how different they were, find themselves in the same situation.

Inspired by Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Sokurov’s Save and Protect recalls the most crucial events of Emma’s decline and fall: affairs with the aristocratic Rodolphe and the student Leon, the humiliation that follows her husband’s botching of the operation on the stable boy’s clubfoot. The universality of the theme of eternal struggle between the soul and the flesh is conveyed through the absence of specific reference to time or place: although the film seems to begin in 1840, its surreal mode effortlessly accommodates an automobile and the strains of “When the Saints Go Marching In” on an off-screen radio. Focusing on passion from a woman’s perspective and downplaying plot, Sokurov explores his subject in exquisite detail, capturing not only the heat of passion but also the quiet moments before and after and the innocent sensuousness of the body.

The first private enterprises are started in the Soviet Union in the late 80s. A gang of bad guys, owners of a private restroom, kidnap a good guy - owner of a toy store. Private eye Dmitri's first job is to try and free the store owner.

As soon as civil servant receives a new high appointment, the all-powerful head of an underground business begins to take an interest in him, who wants to use him to establish connections with criminal structures abroad. Having failed to achieve what he wanted, he begins to take revenge...

Nikolai (played by Sergei Dontsov) has been fired from his job as a music teacher and has to live in the gym until he finds a place to stay. Finally, he gets a communal room in the apartment of Gorokhov (Victor Mikhalkov). The room's previous inhabitant, an old lady, has died a year ago, and yet her cat, Maxi, is still in the locked room, healthy and fat. Soon, Nikolai and his neighbours discover the mystery: there is a window to Paris in the room. That's when the comedy begins - will the Russians be able to cope with the temptation to profit from the discovery?

A very typical post-Soviet era storyline. A bunch of vagabonds lured an innocent teenage girl to their apartment, offered her a drink, intimidated, then gang raped her. Local cops are incapable to undertake an adequate actions against the scoundrels - prevented by the superior chief of the local police, who is the dad of one of the scumbags. The case is closed. The girl's granddad tired of an endless circumlocution decides to take revenge in his own hands.

An almanac of short feature films based on stories by Mikhail Mishin from the collection of short stories "Pause in a Major".