This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.
Released: Dec 01, 1988
Runtime: 139 minutes
Genre: Drama, Science Fiction
Stars: Aleksei Ananishnov, Eskender Umarov, Irina Sokolova, Vladimir Zamanskiy, Kirill Dudkin, Aleksey Yankovskiy
Crew: Aleksandr Sokurov (Director), Yuriy Arabov (Screenplay), Pyotr Kadochnikov (Screenplay), Arkadiy Strugatskiy (Novel), Boris Strugatskiy (Novel), Yelena Amshinskaya (Art Direction)