Bizzare things happen under the full moon. This is especially true to
"The Day of Full Moon". The film is permeated with enigma and ambiguity, and has a lot of magic charm to it.

The camera impassively glides through life, focusing on seemingly unrelated scenes. But as the story unfolds, the viewer discovers that everything is interrelated, and the fates of complete strangers may well be interwoven in some weird way. "The Day of Full Moon" blurs the line between the present and the past, dreams and reality. A supporting character in one episode becomes the focus of another, and the scenes are strung together on the thread of life like beads: an unremarkable personage appearing in a crowd scene turns out to be the descendant of a medieval khan, a young man staring admiringly at a girl on a bus gets killed only minutes later in a gang shootout, an old man riding a suburban train looks vacantly at a dead bandit, recalling his own youth - and his chance encounter with a mysterious stranger in whom he recognized the woman of his dreams. The film involves over 80 characters: new Russians and an old Uzbek, who knows the location of Genghis Khan's grave, a killer and a popular disc jockey, a dead fairy princess and a mysterious monk, who steals her body, and the celebrated Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, who meets a pretty Kalmyk woman during his trip to Arzrum... The viewer's imagination is struck by two female images - those of a dazzling beauty in violet, who appears to different people in their dreams, and a fairy princess, who is reincarnated after her death as a prostitute looking like Madonna...

The Karen Shakhnazarov film is a flow of events and memories; it is an exquisitely beautiful trip through a surreal reality.

Karen Shakhnazarov was born in 1952. After graduating from VGIK in 1975 he made some short satirical films and wrote scripts. He drew attention with his first musical films: We are from the Jazzband (1983), A Winter Evening in Gagry (1985). In 1986 he was awarded special merit for his film The Courier in Moscow. In 1989 he won acclaim with his fantasy vision of a totalitarian world in Zero Town. In 1991 he made a historical fiction story Assasin of the Tsar starring Oleg Yankovsky and Malcolm McDowell. He created a confrontation between the Russian past and present in his playful Dreams (1994), and presented Russian and American mentalities in the melodrama American Daughter (1995). In his most recent film The Day of Full Moon he plays with the poetry of video-clips.

FILMOGRAPHY:
1979 - THE KIND-HEARTED ONES (based on L.Zorin's novel)
1983 - WE ARE FROM THE JAZZBAND
1985 - A WINTER EVENING IN GAGRY
1986 - COURIER (based on his own novel)
1988 - ZERO TOWN
1991 - ASSASSIN OF THE TZAR
1993 - DREAMS
1995 - AMERICAN DAUGHTER
1998 - THE DAY OF FULL MOON