The film, which was produced by White Mirror Film Company, stars the director’s wife Yana Troyanova as Lenka, a kind of modern day Dorothy, a provincial young woman waylaid by a number of quirky events and misadventures while on her way to the very mundane job awaiting her at a kiosk in the city of Yekaterinburg, situated on the border of Europe and Asia. This passive, fate-tossed Dorothy, accompanied by a lost little dog, is sidetracked into the world of exotic sex, prison, prostitution -all dubious life-expanding experiences - on the Russian New Year’s Eve.

Sigarev, who is probably better known in the west as a Russian playwright and theatre director, co-wrote the script to his third fiction feature film with Andrey Ilenkov. The DoP, who has some fun with the lensing, is Dmitriy Ulyukaev.

The film, produced on a budget of 900,000 EUR, was picked up for distribution by the Moscow based sales company Antipode. As a side note, the film was produced without public funding, due to its language content. Banned language is bleeped out of the Russian version, but ends up in its full vulgar glory in its English translation.

The Land of Oz premiered at the Sochi Kinotavr Film Festival in June and is scheduled for theatrical release in Russia in December. Following its international premiere in Cottbus, the film was selected to screen at the Sputnik Russian Film Festival in Poland on 8 November.