Credits: screenplay: Andrey Stempkovsky, Anush Vardanyan, Givi Shavgulidze; director of photography: Zaur Bolotaev; editor: Dmotriy Dumkin; music: Ilya Balaban; producer: Mikhail Kalatozishvili; production: Mikhail Kalatozov Fund;

Country: Russia

Year: 2010

Running time: 93

Colour: Colour

Format: 35 mm

Without music, this film is set in the bleak industrial zone of an enervated Russian city in which glum adults say little and pass the time chain smoking. Stempkovsky has made an unnerving, strikingly photographed movie about the maternal bond and sibling rivalry, withholding energy and tucking it into off-camera actions, self-conscious framing, nearly empty spaces that reveal plenty of information, and the silences between utterances. In a provincial town, a distraught mother mopes, her soldier son having been reported missing in what seems to be Chechnya one month prior. She hides an illegal preadolescent Uzbek boy, possibly mute, who has been smuggled in by a criminal gang and has witnessed one of their murder sprees, and to whom she displaces her maternal affection. The son returns, but is goalless until he seeks revenge for what the gang has done to his “family.”