Elena

Elena may refer to:

People

Places

Fictional characters

Film

Music

Elena (given name)

Elena is a popular female first name in Greek, Slavic, Spanish, Romanian and Italian. It originates in the ancient Greek name Helen/Helene. The variation "Elena" dates back to the 12th century.

Other common variants are Alena (German, Czech, Russian, Belarusian); Alenka (Slovenian); Alyona (Russian); Elene (Georgian); Helen (English); Hélène (French); Helena; Eliana (Portuguese); Ileana (Romanian and Spanish); Ilona (Hungarian, Finnish, and Latvian); Olena (Ukrainian); and Jelena/Yelena (Russian, Serbian).

Notable people

First name

Elena (2011 film)

Elena (Russian: Елена) is a 2011 Russian drama film directed by Andrey Zvyagintsev. It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival where it won the Special Jury Prize.

Plot

The film depicts the social and cultural distance between the inhabitants of an exclusive apartment in downtown Moscow and a crumbling khrushchevka in Moscow's industrial suburb. Elena is a woman with a proletarian background who connects these disparate worlds. She met Vladimir, an elderly business tycoon, in a hospital when she was his nurse. Their alliance has been described by a critic as "a morganatic marriage nearly a century after the October Revolution".

Elena's son from a previous marriage is poor and wants money from Vladimir to have one of his sons enrolled in a university, keeping him out of the compulsory military service. After Vladimir makes it clear that he is not going to subsidize Elena's relatives, she decides to poison him in order to inherit his fortune. Vladimir plans to leave the apartment to his only daughter from an earlier marriage.

Outside

Outside may refer to:

Music

Albums

Songs

Outside (Staind song)

"Outside" is a single by the alternative metal band Staind. It is the second single released off their 2001 album Break the Cycle.

Background

"Outside" was originally performed live during the 1999 Family Values Tour in Biloxi, Mississippi, with Aaron Lewis (vocals/guitar) on the stage by himself and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst providing backing vocals. Lewis was asked to perform a song solo and he decided at the last moment to play a song he had been working on since the early days of Staind. He finished the lyrics to "Outside" on the spot while singing the song live.

"It's really an accidental phenomenon," Lewis explains. "I've been playing it for quite some time. In the early days of the band, any money we made went back into the band, so two or three times a week I played acoustically to make money to live off. 'Outside' was one of the songs I played, but it wasn't really finished, so I made up different words every time. We almost put it on Dysfunction. Then, one night on the Family Values Tour, ten minutes before going onstage, we decided to do it. There was never any thought of releasing it this way."

Outside (David Bowie album)

Outside (sometimes referred to as 1.Outside) is a concept album first released 26 September 1995 by David Bowie on Virgin Records, and Bowie's nineteenth studio album. The album was Bowie's reunion with Brian Eno, whom Bowie had worked with most famously on his Berlin Trilogy in the 1970s. Subtitled "the Ritual Art-Murder of Baby Grace Blue: A non-linear Gothic Drama Hyper-Cycle", Outside centres on the characters of a dystopian world on the eve of the 21st century. The album put Bowie back into the mainstream scene of rock music with its singles "The Hearts Filthy Lesson", "Strangers When We Meet", and "Hallo Spaceboy" (remixed by the Pet Shop Boys).

History and development