Elza lives in a small town in the Republic of Kalmykia on the Caspian Sea. Another year comes to an end, it’s cold and the steppe is covered in a thin layer of snow. When her husband, who makes a living from illegal fishing, asks her one night what she did during the day, she lies. She wasn’t at her mother’s, but at the bus stop. She thought of leaving – to find out what it might be to escape the infinite expanse of her dreary small world. But she didn’t dare; instead she stays and withdraws into herself, unconcerned by who might see. One day, her husband doesn’t return from a dangerous boat trip. It is said that a fisherman only returns if he has a woman waiting for him and that seagulls are the souls of the missing. At the start of a somewhat unplanned pregnancy, widowed and alone, Elza wanders ever further through the city, plotting a path between tradition and the contemporary until she’s no longer on familiar ground.
Es la palabra "horda" la que significó, para muchos países y naciones, redadas sangrientas y estar bajo una contribución humillante durante siglos, un mundo extraño y aterrador con sus propias reglas y costumbres. Ser o no ser para Rus (Ruthenia), ese es el precio de la misión de un solo hombre, ya que se está yendo a este mundo para lograr una hazaña. La película cuenta la historia de cómo san Alexio, el metropolitano de Moscú y el trabajador de las maravillas de toda Rusia, curó a la reina tártara Taidula, la madre de Jani-Beg, de la ceguera, en 1357.
