Director: Lev Kulidzhanov

Crime and Punishment

Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-law student, kills an old pawnbroker and her sister, perhaps for money, perhaps to prove a theory about being above the law. He comes to police attention through normal procedures (he was the victim's client), but his outbursts make him the prime suspect of the clever Porfiry. Meanwhile, life swirls around Raskolnikov: his mother and sister come to the city followed by two older men seeking his sister's hand; he meets a drunken clerk who is then killed in a traffic accident, and he falls in love with the man's daughter, Sonia, a young prostitute. She urges him to confess, promising to follow him to Siberia. Will he accept responsibility?

When the Trees Were Tall

The story of a man who routinely dodges all responsibility, bemoans fate, spends his days boozing, and refuses to work. The act of playing long-lost father to a pretty teenager spurs him to turn over a new leaf.

A Home for Tanya

The adopted daughter of Dr. Skvortsov, Tanya, having learned that her mother Natalya Avdeyevna is alive, who was considered dead during the bombing of World War II, decides to go to her in a distant village on vacation. She recognizes the woman who gave her life and lost her husband and sons due to the war, but cannot call her mother. Meetings on the collective farm with interesting people make Tanya think a lot and experience a lot. She discovers for herself a completely new, largely alien world to her. It does not immediately penetrate the sense of inner kinship with this world, its people, so unusual for her.

The House I Live In

1935. Two families — Davydov's with three children and the newlyweds Lida and Dmitri Kashirin's — enter the new house on the outskirts of Moscow into a common communal apartment. The children grow up, and they and the adults around them are looking for their place in life, looking for answers to the questions of who to be and what to be, quarreling, making peace, building relationships, destroying them. Six years later, the peaceful lives of characters, with their joys and misfortunes, quarrels and reconciliations, and complex personal relationships, are blown up by a war that connects everyone at once, forcing them to see the meaning of their days, their attitudes to each other and their life values in a different way. For some of them, war is a fatal trait.