Four friends from the first movie are back in the saddle. This time they're not only returning to the big sex world but also helping the state on the important mission.
Hoping to break a big jackpot Natasha's stepfather does the financial gamble than substitutes his business partners. The whole family mourns Boris Ivanovich. Everything goes according to plan, until the stepfathers comrade comes.
Mischa, a mute boy, sets out on a surrealistic journey together with his father and two men. Their means of transportation is an old Soviet locomotive, loaded with stolen coal. The travellers intend to sell off the loot on their way through the borderless steppes of inner Russia. As a parallel to the main plot, sequences of a mysterious travelling circus keep reappearing in a very suggestive way. Many of the odd artists at the circus are people that the four protagonists encounter in the wilderness along the overgrown railway. All through the movie there is a sensation of magic crossed with pure realism, stressed by the crackling communistic infrastructure and a twisted sense of humor. The border between reality and fantasy is very subtle here. The Railway is a story about strong family ties, but also an ambitious interpretation of the clash between the Russia of old and new. One could call it the rebirth of a long forgotten genre: the Russian wonder story.
The second film by Kyrgyzstani director Aktan Arym Kubat (then credited by his Russian name Aktan Abdykalykov), it is the first of his autobiographical Kurak ("Quilt") Trilogy, followed by Beshkempir (The Adopted Son, 1998) and The Chimp (2001). Идиллия детства, радости, игры разрушается с возвращением в маленькое горное село моряка. В прекрасный мир девушки, мальчика и юродивого врывается великолепная морская форма с клешами и бескозыркой, и волшебная морская ракушка - источник всех их будущих бед.
