Film > World Cinema - Classic

"[Stealing] the show is the eight-year-old Philipchuk, whose wide eyes register awe, puzzlement and misery with a conviction not seen since Salvatore Cascio in Cinema Paradiso." Empire Magazine

This compelling, Oscar-nominated Russian arthouse favourite follows the theme of an impressionable young boy's fear and awe of a scoundrel father figure. Here, the youngster is Sanya (Misha Philipchuk), a six-year-old Russian boy in Stalinist Russia who longs for a masculine presence in his life, so much that the silent apparition of his biological father, a soldier killed in World War II, frequently comforts him when he is lonely or troubled. The surrogate paterfamilias is the roguish, handsome Tolyan (Mashkov), who sweeps Sanya's naïve mother (Rednikova) off her feet, only to make her and her son unwilling accomplices in a life of crime.