Egor is a fearless state forest guard in the Siberian Taiga. He is a good family man, respected by his fellow villagers. He and his wife Natalia are expecting a second child. But one day Egor finds out that he has cancer and only two months left to live. No traditional medicine or shamanic magic can save him. Finally, left with no other options, he takes a desperate attempt to trick death. Egor chooses to take the identity of a woman as a way of fighting the disease. His family and the local society now have to accept his new self.
Great Poetry is about two guys who live on the outskirts of Moscow and work as cash collectors. They're young, lonely, and all they have in the world is each other. They spend their lives moving money for other people. Dreaming, they attend a poetry class at their local cultural center, and watch cock fights at a dorm for migrant workers. Attempts to find poetry in the prosaic world that surrounds them lead the heroes to the conclusion that the only poetic move they can make is to rob a bank. Paul Claudel wrote that a person lives their life intimately and poetically, and in our film there is a lot of poetry. But the film isn't about words or rhymes. It's about friendship and betrayal, and about our vicious and alien world in which anyone who tries to be honest and consistent ends up looking naive and cruel. It's about the ever-present and incomprehensible force that no matter what makes our life so frantic, strange, and lonely.
A captured Soviet pilot faithful to his childhood friends leads an escape from a German concentration camp and then suffers from communist crimes.