A train ride across Russia becomes a journey into the cultural memory of the nation in director Ali Khamraev's hypnotic feature, one of the many suppressed Soviet films seen for the first time by Western audiences in the 1980s. An ailing mother's request sends her son on a long search for his father's distant gravesite; along the way he encounters a cross-section of Russian society, with every episode rekindling another near-forgotten memory of his childhood in Samarkand. The slow, sensual movement of imagery (beautifully photographed, without being picturesque) provides a fascinating glimpse into the human terrain within the vast country, pushing the film as close to non-narrative territory as a mainstream art house import can get.
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