Alexander Abaturov

In 2013, Dima Ilukhin, the cousin of the film’s director and a soldier in the Russian army, died on duty in the Republic of Dagestan in the North Caucasus. He was 21 years old. This incident marks the starting point for Abaturov’s reflection on the military. He films the training of new recruits in Siberia, as they bid farewell to their mothers and girlfriends, learn the mechanics of a Kalashnikov, or how to throw a hand grenade and administer first aid. While his parents try to cope with their loss, Dima’s former fellow recruits have to return to battle.

Atchinsk, 4000 km from Moscow. In a building in this Siberia town, the residents cross paths in the stairs, not prone to discuss the current campaign to elect the next president.. Outside, the city lives by the rhythm of the cold, only the sound of the radio echos the anti-governemant protests of the capital. Those images of a sleeping town blend with some of the salaried-militants of Poutine's party. Iouri, political mercenary for united Russia coldly explains to me the mechanic of the system. The mise en scène of democratic life becomes a theater…

In 2021, an extreme heatwave gave rise to huge wildfires in the vast subarctic forests of Sakha, a northeastern republic in Siberia. The village of Shologon lies in this taiga landscape, shrouded in orange smoke and black ash. The forest is burning and the flames are approaching fast.

A story of the Siberian province. Girls passed directly on from orphanage to neuropsychiatric institutions are deprived of their rights as citizens: no freedom, no work, and no family. The path to reconquer these rights, in the face of fearsome Russian institutional bureaucracy, is long and difficult. At times, someone succeeds, but the new freedom is then a leap into the unknown.