Production
Retired border guard Sergei Markov, searching for his missing daughter, returns to the border where he served in his youth. To get his daughter back, he must unravel a tangled web of questions and confront the ghosts of the past: crime, revenge, and his own mistakes, which can only be corrected by returning to the beginning—the mountains.
Albania in the 1960s, the city of Gjirokastra. Katya, a graduate of the Philology Department of Moscow State University, marries an Albanian, a young historian whom she met in Moscow. Soon after Katya enters into a dialogue with the dictator Enver Hoxha at an art exhibition, her husband is arrested on trumped-up charges.
Music, dance and art are not just components of human existence. It's something that can keep you alive when there's nothing else left. We know examples when only the strength of the spirit, backed by hope, helped people to survive in the most difficult conditions and resist cold, hunger and death itself.
The entire family of a 6-year-old Anna dies in the mass coordinated execution of Jews. The mother covers up Anna with her own body, and the girl miraculously survives. For the next few hundred days Anna hides in the disused chimney at the Nazi Commandant's office. From her shelter she watches as life passes her by until the village is liberated from the Nazi. In these inhuman conditions Anna not only survives but keeps her humanity. Many factors help her: memories from the life swept away by war, the cultural foundations laid by the parents and a friend who saves her from loneliness.
