Olga Yenzak

Enraged, a teacher murders a young pupil. Over the years, another boy is bred for one sole purpose: to avenge his sister’s death.

On a frozen and forbidding shoreline of northern Sakhalin Island, to the north of Japan, live the Nyvkh people, whose austere, heroic struggle for survival depends solely on their ability to hunt the seal and to fish. This blunt glimpse into their quarters, animistic rituals, and daily (and nightly) lives has all the appearance of a well-shot documentary but is in fact a scripted film with convincing special effects, based on a novella of the same title by the gifted and controversial Soviet Kirghiz writer, Chingiz Aitmatov. "Dog running at the edge of the sea" is what the Nyvkhs call the forbidding place they have domesticated as their home, husbanding and speaking of it by means of myths and "poetry of the concrete" with which they commemorate their savage lives.

The action takes place in the late 1940s. A large-scale land-surveying research is underway in a remote area of Eastern Siberia. The work had almost been concluded when a wire arrives with the news of people disappearing in the locality of Yambuy. The expedition’s chief and radioman decide to go in search of the lost ones. The local Evenk hunters come to their aid. Many dangerous adventures lie in store for these daring people before they find the culprit – a man-eating bear.

The action takes place in a small Korean village in Tajikistan, where fate has thrown Pavel, a Muscovite who has long lost touch with his family and past life, after long wanderings. Fate brings the hero together with an amazing woman of Any kind. In addition to the hard daily work in the onion field, she takes care of her sick husband and does not scold fate. Life has not embittered her, and everything that happens next to her makes sense and harbors hope for the best.

Girl Aya arrives at the sanatorium, and slowly sinking into the interweaving of complex human relationships, taking a pain and suffering of patients and separated people.