December 30, 1941. Vyazma ('Vyazemsky cauldron') is a small detachment of Soviet soldiers, by fatal coincidence, in an unequal battle with a special unit of the Wehrmacht. However, none of them think about giving up. Each of them was ready to sacrifice his life in order to protect his native land. None of these brave people was born a hero. The myth of the red ghost is a heroic deed without a soldier's Soviet soldier in the Great Patriotic War who instilled in the animals, deadly fear of German soldiers. In place of one of the dead hero was inserted another, and the born myth of the invincible Soviet soldier. The film 'The Red Ghost' is about the hope that each soldier will have.

Based on the novel by Booker Prize Winner Ludmila Ulitskaya, The Funeral Party is set in August 1991. In a sweltering New York City apartment, a group of Russian émigrés gathers round the deathbed of an artist named Alik, a charismatic character beloved by them all, especially the women who take turns nursing him as he fades from this world. Their reminiscences of the dying man and of their lives in Russia are punctuated by debates and squabbles: Whom did Alik love most? Should he be baptized before he dies, as his alcoholic wife, Nina, desperately wishes, or be reconciled to the faith of his birth by a rabbi who happens to be on hand? And what will be the meaning for them of the Yeltsin putsch, which is happening across the world in their long-lost Moscow but also right before their eyes on CNN?