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.
Cast
Crew
Aleksandr Sokurov
Director
Yuriy Arabov
Screenplay
Pyotr Kadochnikov
Screenplay
Arkadiy Strugatskiy
Novel
Boris Strugatskiy
Novel
Leda Semyonova
Editor
Aleksandr Burov
Director of Photography
Sergey Yurizditskiy
Director of Photography
Yelena Amshinskaya
Production Design
Lidiya Kryukova
Costume Design
Olga Smirnova
Makeup Artist
Zhanna Rodionova
Makeup Artist
Vladimir Persov
Sound Director
Yuri Khanon
Original Music Composer
