Yatsenko plays Sasha, a manager on a former collective farm in the Russian north.  He has a reasonably “happy life” with an ongoing love affair with Anya who works as a secretary at the local government office and a good relationship with his farm workers who respect him.

But then the district administrators offer him a deal to buy up the farm and while at first he is ready to sell out his workers convince him to refuse and to fight to keep the farm.

Despite their pledges to fight alongside him the all eventually desert him and he finds himself backed into a corner facing the bad guys who want to buy the farm alone.

In this morality tale of an honest man opposing evil and corruption alone in today’s corrupt Russia there are echoes of old time American Westerns where the lone sheriff faces down the bad guys but this is Russia and you know it is never going to work out quite the same way.

Speaking at the press conference director Khlebnikov who also c0-wrote the script with Alexander Rodionov said that the idea for the film originated as a sort of joke when he was watching an old classic American Western and thought how it might look if this was transferred to Russia.  From there the project developed into a much more serious story but the overtones of the American Western and the good guys versus the bad guys remain.

The director cast the film from the actors of favourite theatre troupe that he had wanted to work with for some time augmenting the cast with people form the local village where he was shooting.

While the film can be viewed as a portrait of rural modern Russia and the struggle of a courageous individual against a corrupt bureaucracy Khlebnikov insisted that while the film was a social film it was a personal story not a story about the Russian national character or today’s Russia.

Throughout the film nature plays a leading role and takes the film beyond its not very profound plot.  Kostomarov manages to capture the remoteness of the Russian north and its dying villages without romanticizing it.

He won a Silver Bear in Berlin in 2010 for his work on How I Ended Last Summer directed by Alexei Pogogrebsky, another film where the remote landscape plays a major role.

While Khlebnikov develops an interesting story unfortunately the dramatic and violent ending does not quite click as being in tune with the rest of the film leaving the viewer feeling somewhat dissatisfied.  But the Koktebel brand along with Kostomarov’s great lensing should carry the film far on the international festival circuit.

 

Director: Boris Khlebnikov
Russian Federation 2013
Cast: Alexander Yatsenko, Eugene Sitiy, Anna Kotova