A man's thoughts of revenge turn to thoughts of reconciliation as he comes to know his intended victim a little better. The story is set in contemporary Russia following the destruction of the Communist regime.
Multiple-value and tangled relationships between servant and boss... Imperceptible displacement of recognizable reality... Metaphysical dimension of our lives...
A young teenage boy zealously tracks down criminals in this allegorical drama. Using the code name of Plumbum, Ruslan Chutko (Anton Androsov) delights in the pursuits of lawbreakers before informing the police, and he even turns in his own father when he catches him poaching fish. The questions are left to the viewer whether or not Plumbum is a crusading hero or a scoundrel. Western audiences may find the premise implausible, but children were known to inform on their own parents under the regime of Josef Stalin and others.
In this drama with socio-political nuances, a heroic engineer is able to save the passengers on his train from injury or death by sacrificing his own life when his locomotive crashes. An investigator Ermakov and journalist Malinin are both involved in the story of the crash but from two different angles: the investigator wants to find out why it happened, the journalist wants to laud the heroism of the dead engineer.
