Synopsis

With his wife and son, Nikolai lives on the shore of a small bay in the Barents Sea in the north of Russia. The town mayor wants to take away his land, his house and his car workshop for a ridiculous amount of money. Nikolai brings the case to court, but he loses. Desperate, he turns to his old friend Dmitri, a prestigious lawyer in Moscow. Dmitri starts investigating and is soon able to prove that the mayor is corrupt. However, that does not intimidate the hard-boiled politician: with his cronies from the local administration, he beats back brutally - in the most literal sense of the word. Andrej Swjaginzew's captivating drama - a “nightmarishly beautiful feature” (Der Spiegel) - was highly praised by the press: the screenplay as well as the cast's performance and the hypnotic music by Philip Glass, the stunning camera work and the naturalistic mise-en-scène with its cynical and satirical undertone. This film contains more than just criticism of Russian society: it is a universal tale of a simple man who gets more and more entangled in a web of corruption, abuse of power and violence within a totalitarian system.