Aleksandr Gonorovsky
August 15, 1990. Viktor Tsoi, the Soviet Union’s most famous rock star, a symbol of freedom and change, dies in an accident on a Latvian highway. The bus driver who was involved in the tragic accident will bring his body back to Leningrad. A party of mourners — Tsoi’s wife and her new boyfriend, his mistress, his producer, his young son and an obsessed photographer — are part of the trip back. This is going to be a long trip, the perfect occasion for an agonizing unravelling of love, jealousy, ambition, and greed.
The action takes place shortly after the end of the Second World War in the Siberian hinterland, among Russians and Germans with damaged personal stories and a strange transformation: the victors seem to be crawling into the skins of the defeated, and vice versa. Ignat, is the embodiment of the larger-than-life image of the Soviet victorious warrior who, in fact, proves to be shell-shocked, sick and broken, although not completely destroyed. Trains become fetish for the heroes of the film, and speed becomes a mania; they virtually become one with their steam engines, while the machines take on human names. The heroes set up an almost fatal race in the Siberian forest, risking their own lives and those of others.
Comedy drama about two friends who steal a car of coal and want to sell it, for which they carry coal on an old steam locomotive on an abandoned railway. Despite the fact of the crime, his goals seem to be good: one of the thieves is a school principal who wants to make repairs in the classrooms and buy computers, and the second is a driver who went on an adventure with his son, in the hope that the seven — year-old Bear will talk. They had to take the driver with them — an old one, like the engine itself. The railway, which has not been used for many years, becomes for this eccentric company a path from the past to a bright, possibly future.
