An account of the life and work of Russian filmmaker Andrey Tarkovsky (1932-86) in his own words: his memories, his vision of art and his reflections on the fate of the artist and the meaning of human existence; through extremely rare audio recordings that allow a complete understanding of his inner life and the mysterious world existing behind his complex cinematic imagery.
Many years after a deadly terrorist siege in a Moscow theatre, survivor Natalya returns to the crime scene to hold a memorial evening, finally able to confront her survivor's guilt and her estranged daughter and husband.
Sonia, a girl from St. Petersburg, decides to seek a better life in Western Europe. She first gets a job at a car dealer in Germany. But she is suddenly kidnapped and sold into sexual slavery. She will be dragged from country to country and resistance will only bring her misery and humiliation.
A study of ennui and female repression within a world rarely seen onscreen - Italy's hermetic nobility.
Datho (Merab Ninidze) has been innocent in prison for many years. When he comes home nobody wants him. His angelic wife Elene (Anna Antonowicz) has fun with a fire-eater. The two children imagined the father as a hero, not as a sorrowful knight. But everything changes when Datho can freeze his enemies in the bathtub or he calls for rain so that they remain stuck in the mud.
Jani Budi, 60s, after serving a sentence, was released from prison in Ancona and embarks on a ship to return to his country of origin, Albania. Arriving in Tirana he discovers the shocking truth: his wife died shortly after his arrest, and his son, Andi, has become politically corrupt. The film is a combination of drama and comedy that scans Albania today and human relations.
Todor, a Serbian smuggler in Trieste, Italy, earns his daily bread by smuggling fake brand cigarettes. He sails out in a small boat to collect his freight if there is enough mist to make his illegal mission possible. One day he reluctantly accepts a much larger cargo. In the crate he finds a wounded and drugged woman. Todor decides not to deliver the freight and takes the woman home with him. He takes a chest full of stones to his client and it soon becomes apparent that he has got himself into big trouble with this manoeuvre. Todor takes care of the woman, who slowly but surely overcomes her fear of him. By the time he manages to get her a passport, an unbreakable bond has silently grown between them and he asks her to go away with him. Fate decides otherwise.
Karlygash (translated from Kazakh as "swallow") lives with her husband Ilyas and father-in-law on a horse farm, lost in the Kazakh steppe. Karlygash is a stranger to everyone here, and Ilyas has not yet forgotten about his first love for a girl named Aina. Everything changes with the arrival of a foreigner in their village - Frenchman Louis, a photographer who went on a trip after breaking up with his wife.
Before the Night portrays ordinary life under the enduring state of emergency, from the perspective of its three characters. Gulbîn, a painter living with her parents, is trying to make her own way in life, while obsessively painting a portrait of her mum with inspiration from Whistler's painting Mother. The mother models for her daughter while trying to insulate her house from the noise of the bombs to no avail. The father, whose health is deteriorating, tries to reimagine his war-stricken city with old photographs he took.
