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★★★★☆ Pavel Ruminov's I'll Be Around (Ya Budu Ryadom, 2012) makes its way to the 6th London Russian Film Festival after winning the Grand Prix Award at this year's Kinotavr Film Festival - the largest film festival currently held in Russia. A harrowing and emotionally overwhelming tale about the bond between mother and son, I'll Be Around pulls at the heartstrings without ever succumbing to cliched Hollywood manipulation techniques - and is all the more tragic as a result. Inna (Mariya Shalayeva) is a restaurant manager and single mother who has an incredibly close-knit relationship with her son that transcends maternal duty into genuine friendship.

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Not so long ago these pages were awash with coverage of Pavel Ruminov’s Dead Daughters as we simply fell in love with the young Russian director’s manipulation of J-horror motifs, his fantastic eye behind the camera and a seemingly never ending supply of stunning key art. That film ended up being a fairly divisive one and what Ruminov has chosen to follow it up with could not possibly be much more different. After his big ghost story he is now back with Circumstances, a slapstick, single set, dinner party comedy with a darkly absurd twist. Ruminov hired a group of theater actors for this one and workshopped it heavily while feeding his players a steady diet of Billy Wilder films and the end result looks pretty much unlike anything I’ve ever seen out of Russia up until now.

There are three trailers for the film so far,...

MOSCOW -- Russian horror movie Dead Daughters -- which screened at the European Film Market in Berlin in February and is due for local release here in the fall -- has sold to U.S. producers Gold Circle Films for an English-language remake, filmmakers Praktika Pictures and commissioning producers Central Partnership said Thursday. The U.S. company, headed by Paul Brooks, has optioned the remake rights for an adaptation of writer-director Pavel Ruminov's dark thriller by U.S. genre screenwriter Jared Rivet. Yelena Vernikovskaya of Praktika Pictures said the deal boded well for the success of Ruminov's film, which tells the story of three girls murdered by their mad mother who reappear as ghosts in Moscow hell-bent on revenge.