Documentary cinema is most often a matter of search and exploration. Let us see what the directors of this year’s National Competition have set out to explore.

Sometimes the search begins within one’s own family. Such is Old House by Lyubov Korlykhanova, where the author and her sister try to uncover what really happened to their parents, who died long ago under mysterious circumstances. In Conversation, experimental film classic Masha Godovannaya visits her elderly father to learn about his youth—and to better understand herself. Sasha Zubkovsky’s Holidays, woven from amateur Soviet-era home footage, immerses us in the everyday lives of the director’s grandparents’ generation.

Next to this quiet, intimate world of family are other worlds entirely. In Sofya Keller’s Nets, we witness elderly women volunteers weaving camouflage nets, while Inna Kudryavtseva’s Happin follows a mother of many awaiting her beloved’s return from the frontline.

This year’s competition features many films about death and transience. Murad Kamalov’s Birthday sees a funeral repast evolve into a dialogue on existential themes. At the heart of Lida Kanashova’s Adventures of a Real Samurai in the World of Disasters is a child’s progressive illness with an uncertain outcome. In Konstantin Atamanyuk’s Vishev. Pause, an elderly professor entrusts her brain to cryonic preservation, hoping to return to a world where immortality has already been mastered.

Unexpectedly, outer space has become an important theme. Mikhail Arkhipov’s Once Upon a Time in Leningrad simply yet sensitively portrays director Pavel Klushantsev, who created popular-science masterpieces on the margins of Lennauchfilm, in parallel with—if not in spite of—the entire Soviet space programme. In Not Enough Space by Artem Ignatiev and Anton Petrov, young astrophysicists view interstellar expanses not just scientifically but as an artistic and philosophical pursuit, literally seeking and creating the music of the spheres. Yana Osman and Anton Khamchishkin’s ΚΟΙΝΟΣ ΚΟΣΜΟΣ (which can be translated as Common World), despite its title, eschews outer space for a collision between eternity and modernity.

Comedy—the most challenging genre in documentary—shines in Pavel Timofeev’s Not Karenina (about a rising theatre and film star), Arina Galizdra’s Harmony and Love (love, laughter, and video circles over Telegram), and Yana Isaenko’s Mind the Closing Doors (on the daily lives of Moscow metro workers).

Finally, one film in the competition deliberately limits the scope of its exploration: just a ping-pong table—in the latest work by rising star of Russian documentary Ivan Vlasov.

Alena Solntseva, Pavel Pugachev