The renowned Russian director has spent almost 20 months imprisoned in his apartment after being placed under house arrest in August 2017. He was released on Monday, but he still faces trial. Serebrennikov is accused of conspiring to embezzle state funds of the theater he manages, but the charges are widely viewed as politically motivated. If convicted, he could spend up to 10 years in prison.

The director gained his mainstream renown thanks to the state's blessing, as during the mid- to late 2000s, Putin agreed to develop a bold and experimental arts scene. Serebrennikov, who was born in 1969 and had studied physics before directing plays and TV films in southern Russia's Rostov-on-Don, was noticed by Russia's Minister of Culture when he started working in Moscow in his 30s.

Serebrennikov was appointed as the artistic director of this small state-run theater in 2012 and turned the Gogol Center into one of the most popular venues for Moscow's liberal intelligentsia, bringing together theater, contemporary dance, music, cinema and classes. In May 2017, Russian authorities had the multidisciplinary arts complex raided and arrested three employees of the theater.

Serebrennikov staged various successful productions at the Gogol Center, such as an adaptation of Lars von Trier's "The Idiots" in 2015. In reaction to the massive protest movements against Putin following the elections of 2011, the state's ideology changed. The Minister of Culture was replaced by a conservative nationalist in 2012. The Orthodox Church's influence on the Kremlin became stronger.

Meanwhile, Kirill Serebrennikov's acclaim had started spreading internationally, with his films screened at the world's top festivals and his theater productions also touring abroad. He was invited as a guest director at Berlin's Komische Oper in 2016, where he produced his interpretation of Rossini's comic opera from 1816, "The Barber of Seville."

Serebrennikov also directed the film "The Student," which screened at Cannes in 2016. An allegory for the country's growing conservatism, it portrays a student who drags his school into disaster after becoming a religious fanatic. The director had also started directly criticizing the state's treatment of LGBT community in the country and Russia's seizure of Crimea in 2014.

In July 2017, the Bolshoi Theater's sold-out premiere of the ballet "Nureyev," portraying the famous ballet dancer of the same name, was cancelled at the last minute. Rumors started circulating that influential Orthodox authorities didn't approve its depiction of homosexual love and wanted it reworked. Serebrennikov was already in his fourth month of house arrest when the piece finally premiered.

He was directing this movie in St. Petersburg when he was arrested on the film set on August 22, 2017. The next day, Serebrennikov was sentenced to house arrest in Moscow. "Leto" (Summer) is a biopic portraying Soviet rock icon Viktor Tsoi and Leningrad's underground culture of the 1980s. It competed at the Cannes festival in 2018, but the director was not allowed to attend the premiere.

The detained director obtained prominent support worldwide, including at the 2018 Cannes film festival (picture). A clear demonstration of the absurdity of the embezzlement charges against Serebrennikov and his colleagues at the Gogol Center came when prosecutors claimed a production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" had never occurred — even though it had won many awards and went on to tour abroad.

Based on four short dramas by Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, "Little Tragedies" is just one of the classics Serebrennikov tackled. It premiered in September 2017, just a few weeks after his arrest. The production included references to current events and the director's absence, such as excerpts of the poem "October 19," which was also the date Serebrennikov was due to appear in court.

Another Serebrennikov production was scheduled to premiere at the Stuttgart Opera in October 2017, a few months after his arrest. His interpretation of "Hänsel and Gretel" was to feature footage shot in Rwanda. The opera house nevertheless offered an incomplete version of the work, which was subtitled "A fairytale about hope and misery told by Kirill Serebrennikov."

While detained in his two-room apartment without access to the internet or a phone, Serebrennikov managed to stage elaborate productions, providing his instructions on USB sticks to his assistants. His latest opera, adapted from Verdi's "Nabucco," premiered at Hamburg's Staatsoper in March. Even though he was freed from house arrest on April 8, the director is still not allowed to leave Moscow.

On a faraway island, a sailor discovers an ideal society: There is equality among the locals, it is democratic, ownership is communal. It was the opposite of life in England at the time. And: there were no epidemics, unlike England that had suffered from the plague more than once. The above photo shows Dresden Semper Opera dancers as "Utopians" in a musical theater project based on More's novel.

Seven women and three men flee the plague to a country house near Florence. As cruel as the descriptions are at the beginning, the 100 novellas in the collection are surprisingly entertaining. To pass the time, each of the fugitives determines a topic per day and everyone has to tell a corresponding story. Subtle or crude, tragic or comical — a whole world unfolds.

Bacon envisioned a utopian island by the name of Bensalem, home to the people of the lost city of Atlantis. They are very involved in research and science, and inventions including the submarine, wind turbines and hearing aids are anticipated on "New Atlantis." Foreign seafarers were initially quarantined to protect islands from possible diseases.

Daniel Defoe, five years old and whisked away to the countryside to keep him safe during the Great Plague in London, relied on eyewitness accounts and meticulous research for his description of the devastating events. Defoe tells the tale of a city in a state of emergency, faced with hysteria, superstition, unemployment, looting and fraud.

In Camus' "The Plague," a doctor by the name of Bernard Rieux describes how first rats die of the plague, followed by thousands of citizens in the Algerian port city of Oran. Everyone takes a different approach to the fight against the Black Death, but in the end, it kills the innocent and the ruthless alike.

A mutant virus breaks out of a military research laboratory and kills almost the entire US population. Only few are immune, left to assert themselves in a depopulated world with a collapsed infrastructure. Two groups — basically the "good" and the "evil" — emerge, both headed by charismatic leaders.

The inhabitants of a nameless city go blind all of a sudden. To prevent the spread of a potential disease, they are housed in an empty psychiatric ward, and attended to by a doctor and his wife, played by Mark Ruffalo and Julianne Moore in the 2008 film of the same name (picture). The situation quickly escalates, but in the greatest chaos, some people regain their eyesight.

The novel is set in Newark, New Jersey in the summer of 1944 during a severe outbreak of polio. It recreates the terror, fear, poor information and feeling of powerlessness among the population faced by a paralytic disease that mainly affected children, crippling one child after the next. A vaccine wasn't available until 1955.