3rd RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL 30 October – 8 November 2009 Apollo Piccadilly, London T: 0871 220 6000 Academia Rossica is proud to present 10 UK premieres of award-winning Russian films produced in. All films with English subtitles. Programme director: Andrey Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. The festival opens on 30 October with a new adaptation of Anna Karenina by one of Russia’s most defiant film directors, Sergei Soloviev. The film took 14 years to make and it is part of Soloviev’s trilogy ASSA (1987) – ASSA-2 (2009) – Anna Karenina (2009). Full programme of the Festival:

3rd RUSSIAN FILM FESTIVAL 30 October – 8 November 2009 Apollo Piccadilly, London T: 0871 220 6000 Academia Rossica is proud to present 10 UK premieres of award-winning Russian films produced in. All films with English subtitles. Programme director: Andrey Plakhov, President of FIPRESCI. The festival opens on 30 October with a new adaptation of Anna Karenina by one of Russia’s most defiant film directors, Sergei Soloviev. The film took 14 years to make and it is part of Soloviev’s trilogy ASSA (1987) – ASSA-2 (2009) – Anna Karenina (2009). Full programme of the Festival:

The first day ended with an evening with Dmitry Bykov and Bridget Kendall at Waterstone’s, Piccadilly. Bykov entertained the large audience with, along with everything else, a joke. It went like this: “At birth you get a label put on your arm, after death, it’s put on your foot. If someone gets the same number both times, they win a prize – a pressure cooker.”

Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the ‘European' side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin's love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has lived in Moscow ever since.

Despite the numerous linguistic obstacles thrown up by his novels, especially in their opening sections, Aleksei Ivanov has enjoyed phenomenal popular and critical success in the past five years. In his two breakthrough ‘historical' novels of adventure and fantasy, Heart of the Taiga (Serdtse Parmy, 2003) and Gold of the Rebellion, or Down the River of Gorges (Zoloto bunta, ili vniz po reke tesnin, 2005), Ivanov gives full expression to his fascination with local lore and its relation to Russian history. By contrast, The Geographer who Drank Away his Globe (Geograf globus propil, 2003) and Cheap Porn (the English title given by Ivanov's agents to the untranslatable Bluda i MUDO, 2007) have belied Ivanov's reputation as the kraeved (local historian) from Perm.

Vladimir Makanin was born in 1937 in Orsk, a city which straddles the Ural River. Makanin himself recalls how every morning he would cross from the ‘European' side where he lived, into Asia, to go to school, before returning back to Europe in the evening. Makanin's love of chess led him to enter Moscow State University to study Mathematics - and for six years after that he was a mathematician working in a laboratory of the Dzherzhinsky Military Academy. He has lived in Moscow ever since.

Tretyakov Gallery
This issue is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s most famous art museum which contains the national collection of Russian art.

Moscow – The Third Rome,
Stalin’s Capital, Global City
This issue focuses on Russia’s capital city as myth, as physical history, and as the future.

Moscow – The Third Rome,
Stalin’s Capital, Global City
This issue focuses on Russia’s capital city as myth, as physical history, and as the future.

Tretyakov Gallery
This issue is dedicated to the 150th anniversary of the Tretyakov Gallery, Russia’s most famous art museum which contains the national collection of Russian art.