Buddha's Smile

“The main character Sergei is a Russian tour guide. He is completely mired in loans and debts. In order to get out of this pit, he invents a legend and organizes a tour of Buryatia, at the end of which he promises tourists a meeting with a real Baikal mermaid. Unexpectedly for him, completely different people who come to Lake Baikal for their dream respond to his ad on the internet: an elderly Japanese woman, a childless family from St. Petersburg, a single European, two killers from Moscow, a noisy Chinese family, and four religious Mongols.

A young man called Sharnokhoi rents a small cabin on the outskirts of UlanUde, a small city in eastern Siberia, with his fiancée Garalma. She ran away from home after her parents forbade her to marry Sharnokhoi. Garalma is pregnant. Suddenly on a way home she sees a strange man in a busy city street through the window of the bus – a horseman wearing the ancient armor of the Huns, riding a black horse and carrying weapons. Garalma feels sick, doctors from the local hospital can’t make an accurate diagnosis of her condition and keep making tests and giving her strong sedative injections every few hours. Sharnokhoi meets another patient of the hospital, an old Buryat man who tries to explain to Sharnokhoi that the doctors cannot help his wife and that if he wants to save her a special shaman ceremony should be performed.