television series

Shameless slimeball Eduard "Edik" Letov - clad in an everpresent Hawaiian shirt - puts the sting on alien travelers hoping to connect with their roots, by having local phonies pose as the visitors' long-lost relatives. Complications abound when Letov attempts to pass off an entire village under the guise of a community wiped out during the Second World War. The arrival of a group of trouble-causing misfits, among them mobster Barukh - who wishes to bury his mother's remains, only to discover that someone keeps exhuming them - and the lech Simon - a Canadian with an insatiable fetish for his sexy translator - turn Letov's latest scheme into a veritable cat's cradle.

Russia, early 90s. A fictional story inspired by financier Sergey Mavrodi, his securities company "MMM", and the pyramid scheme he ran that left upwards of fifteen million investors with nothing when it crashed.

An expelled journalism student, trying to make sense of his life, carefully documents his summer, as well as the story of the disappearance and death of the founders of one of the first startups on the Russian Internet.

After an accident, memories of his service on the Ninth Planet flash in the mind of auto mechanic Dima Khrust: amazing landscapes, the base of earthlings, battles with monsters, friends and his beloved girl Polina, whom he once saved... Khrust's colleagues twist their fingers at their temples, because theirs is completely different - ordinary army memories. But when Dima meets Polina in real life, he no longer doubts: someone corrected their memories. Who and why? The truth can only be found out by returning to the dangerous planet.

Like Fritz Lang, David Fincher or Bong Joon Ho before him, talented debut filmmaker Lado Kvataniya uses the concept of police detective vs serial killer for an excitingly stylised, macabre and haunting narrative, that ultimately revolves around the identity of an era: in this case, the late 1980s Soviet Union. With Glasnost and the end of communist rule, the West also learned of the (unsurprising) fact that there were serial killers in Russia too – the most notorious case probably that of Andrei Chikatilo, nicknamed the Rostov Ripper, or the Russian Hannibal Lecter.
Based on these and many other sources, Kvataniya and screenwriter Olga Gorodetskaya constructed an immersive psychological puzzle, jumping back and forth in time, to reveal ever new-possible motives for the actions of all the protagonists. It all starts in 1990, when Detective Issa Davydov is celebrating his promotion and receives a call, reporting a crime that looks precisely like the ones of the serial killer that he famously captured some years before ...