Art Direction
During the final winter of WWII, as displaced persons return to their former homes in the Soviet Union, an 8-year-old boy is left alone when his mother dies en route.
Production Design
Two men at a remote Arctic base begin mistrusting each other after an important radio message.
Cinematography
Art Direction
Deaf Russian village - a real bearish corner. People live here like a hundred years ago, in their quiet and seemingly inconspicuous life there is everything - birth and death, the struggle of love and hate, good and evil, honor and betrayal.
Cinematography
Sergey Dvortsevoy makes his international debut with this astonishingly intimate portrait of a nomadic family on the Kazakh plains. Several scenes in this slow, elegant film betray a certain dry humor -- a child devouring the last of a bowl of yogurt and then crying; a cow getting its head stuck in a pail; and a woman singing to herself, accompanied by her snoring husband. Other scenes capture the nomads' hardscrabble lives -- drunken herdsmen in the grips of existential despair, growling dogs, and a camel enduring a rather grim septum piercing. By the end of the film, the family pulls up stakes and herds its sundry four-legged beasts -- camels, cattle, goats, dogs, and horses -- to a more fertile plain. This film was screened at the 1999 Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival.
