Vera and Billy

A character created over the time of animating the cobweb and thinking about Bix Beiderbecke's Mississippi Mud. Additional music by Andrew Bernstein with Gillian Waldo.

Vera, a woman of questionable character places a wager that she will be able to destroy a happy marriage and inveigle the husband into becoming her lover. She succeeds to the extent of a midnight tryst in the family's home, witnessed by the couple's 12-year-old daughter. Her resolve weakened by the child's piteous pleas, Vera deliberately loses the wager, freeing the sadder-but-wider husband to return to his forgiving wife.

Vera lives in the shadow of her famous father. Tired of her superficial life and relationships, she drifts through Roman high society. When she injures a child in a traffic accident in the suburbs, she forms an intense relationship with an eight-year-old boy and his father. But soon she must realize that also in this world she is only an instrument for others.

Vera, a young woman who accompanied the elderly and very sick people to suicide. When she meets dementia Gerda on her next assignment, she realizes that Gerda has a mysterious connection to Vera's family. Vera tries to extend the life of Gerda against the will of the family to solve the mystery.

Vera lives solely on the problems of her family: her eternally ill husband Kostya and her fifteen-year-old son Romka. In fact, Vera is happy with everything, until her husband's first love suddenly appears on the horizon - the beautiful Lyudmila and her daughter Yulya. There is nothing special about the latter, but, as luck would have it, it is this girl that Romka is interested in. Now she is seriously thinking about divorce and exchanging an apartment, trying to force her son to move away from Yulka.