Pod elektricheskimi oblakami (2015)

This quotation by Paul Cézanne serves as the film’s epigraph. Alexei German Jr. used these words to emphasize that his aim was to return to Impressionism through poetic storytelling and convey a sense of the country and its time. The film’s plot is described as follows: “This is a picture about a country crucified between the past, the present, and the future. Time in Russia is not linear; we are a paradoxical country where time can move forward, then be rewound, and then move forward again.” The film takes place in 2017, the anniversary year of the Great October Revolution. The world is expecting a major war. The main characters’ storylines are barely connected. They are very different, but each is an “excess man” in the tradition of classic Russian literature. The film revolves around an unfinished building where the protagonists’ fates intertwine. It consists of seven chapters: “Other People’s Speech,” “Heirs,” “The Long Dreams of a Land Lawyer,” “A Building Lot,” “Hostage,” “The Architect,” and “The Mistress.” Each chapter tells the story of different people—from a migrant worker to an architect, from a generation raised on Dostoevsky to one associated with the Apple brand. Each story has its own protagonist: rich and poor, Russian and immigrant, someone who lives in peacetime and someone who has just returned from war. Their stories intersect through chance encounters in Russia’s major cities and on the outskirts. The film *Under Electric Clouds* is a tale reflecting the lives of contemporaries faced with moral choices—not only split-second ones, but also considered and deliberate choices. In making the film, Alexei German Jr. followed the traditions of the Russian novel: “A film novel whose chapters are interconnected, each adding to the overall picture. It has many storylines and a wide range of characters, and its time span runs from the 1990s to the near future, 2017. It is an attempt to capture the image of an era in poetic form.” The electric clouds mentioned in the film’s title symbolize how different generations understand the same concept: for some, they are storm clouds in the sky; for others, cloud storage on modern gadgets.