Dmitry Sidorov

How is it possible to feel someone elses pain? The hero of this film is an autistic boy. His life is divided between an apartment with peeling walls on the outskirts of a large city, and a mental hospital. Anton comes into the frame when he is on the point of becoming a patient at a residential neuropsychiatric institution, a place where people with the sort of diagnosis that he has do not live long. The author, the camera, the hero. The distance between them shrinks with every passing minute, and the author has to enter the shot and become a character in the story. However, it is not a story about how one person helped another, but about how one person recognized herself in another. About how there is Another who lives in each of us and must be destroyed every day inside of us in order to survive.

At different times, people look at the camera in different ways: at the beginning of the 20th century not the way they did in the 1920s, in the 1940s differently than now... The cinematic look, developing, begins to influence the human perception of all reality. A certain character, on whose behalf the narration is being conducted, searches in the film archive for frames in which people look at the camera, and carefully examines them, trying to discover the hidden meaning of these gazes from the past.

Exotic wilderness, foothills of the Caucasus. Architect Alexander and artist Marina with their young son Ilya settled here almost 30 years ago. They left the big city in search of peace, solitude and freedom. Ilya grew up in the forest and in the mountains. Now he has the Internet – the only source of communication with the outside world. The relationship between the heroes, externally built on love and attention, internally is full of Chekhov's drama... The film raises the acute social problem of the so-called “downshifting” – a departure from civilization and living as hermits.