Saviour

Russia, early 90s. Mariya, the owner of a small video rental store in an abandoned cinema, has her son disappear under strange circumstances. To understand what happened and find her son, Mariya has to cross the path of crime boss Egor Bocharov, make friends with fugitive criminal Dmitriy Shilin, reveal the secret of the ghost living in the cinema and find out how he is connected with the mysterious film number 8.

During the Soviet-Afghan War, in the days when general secretary of the Communist Party Leonid Breznev, in a military hospital a young lieutenant wounded almost to death meets a young military nurse, tired almost to death. One meeting. One night. One candle. A short from Vladimir Koptsev, Alexander Sokurov’s pupil.

What does an actor leave behind? That is the question that Alla Demidova asks herself, the audience, the eternity. She went and lived through the tragedies by Shakespeare, Electra, Phaedra, Medea. Where can one go henceforth? If only become a phantom, an image, something eternal, an enduring reflection of this world in the mirror. This film is a journey away from our reality to an imaginary universe, to reflections, images, phantoms. It starts with an exposition devoted to Alla Demidova at the St. Petersburg Museum of Theatre and Music Art. But it does not only document the space; thanks to Demidova's speech it turns into a retrospective of her work, the parts she played, an explication of her approach to acting.

Two directors begin casting a film about the 1990s, which gradually devolves into a space of uncertainty where the distinction between document and fiction disappears. This subtle disruption in the process—the appearance of a single actor obsessed with "accuracy"—leads to a loss of control and implicates them. At the edge of this experience, between life and death, both directors find themselves inside their own, never-made film.

This film tells about people whose hands create the main components of life on the planet every day. And it’s not just the material basis of our world made of metal, concrete or wood, but it’s also something that gives meaning to our lives, inspires and gives hope. The film’s characters — a locksmith and a fisherman, a steelworker and a farmer, a furniture maker and an anesthesiologist — are followed by the film’s Director, who suddenly turns from an observer into a creator.

The film was shot in the period from spring to winter 2021 in the vicinity of the village of Luzhitsy, which is located in the west of the Leningrad region. It was during this period that the natural and social landscape of these places began to change catastrophically due to the grandiose industrial development. The situation especially affects the Volga region, a small people with a thousand-year history who survived wars, revolutions and the Stalinist era.