Konstantin Ryabinov

The film details the early years of the legendary Siberian Punk/Rock group 'Гражданская Оборона' (Grazhdanskaya Oborona), and its frontman, Egor Letov.

The world's first documentary about Siberia's punk rock scene in the 1980s. It was a phenomenon of those times that this music existed thousands of miles away from the movement's epicentres in New York and London.

By My Side is a poetic meditation on our inability to notice the most important thing in live: love. It is an exploration of our tendency to hide from love and bar it from our lives; to unknowingly push it away, bewildered by our own feelings, even when it appears in the guise of a regular, flesh-and- blood woman. And yet, it always comes back...