“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. They attend a poetry class at the local cultural center and watch cockfights at a dorm for migrant workers. Their attempts at finding poetry in the prosaic world around lead them to the conclusion that the only poetic move they can make is to rob a bank. 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 naïve and cruel. It’s about the everpresent and incomprehensible force that — in spite of everything — makes our life so frantic, strange, and lonely

Great Poetry

While digging one of the many tunnels for the Moscow metro, Soviet workers unearth ruins of a dungeon. The site is closed, the metro tunnel is diverted, and amidst the bustle no one notices the tunnel workers’ foreman pocketing a little ‘souvenir’ – a book-sized frame made of precious metals featuring an inscription in an unknown language. Decades later, the foreman’s grandson Ilya, who works as a courier, discovers the ancient relic in a pile of old junk. Oblivious to the true value of the family heirloom, he soon learns about it from a mysterious stranger. The relic is the key to the secret location of the priceless ancient library that belonged to Ivan the Terrible. What Ilya doesn’t know is that the search for the lost library has been going on for centuries, and now very powerful people are after him. Ilya and the mysterious stranger decide to try their luck in finding the library.