This film was shown on the closing night of the Russian Film Symposium at Pittsburgh Filmmakers screening room, which was the ideal venue for such a film. This is the director's first major film and has been hailed as inaugurating a new period in Post-Soviet Russian filmmaking. As such, of course, its depths are scarcely perceptible without some knowledge of the Soviet past.
A writer presents his manuscript to a publishing house, which rejects it. One by one, however, members of the editorial board retrieve the manuscript from the waste basket, each reading a different one of the four short stories, which they endow with the physical details of their imaginations. Thus the film as a whole creates a novel in the mind of the viewer through visual details and unexpected juxtapositions. There is a good deal of humor, with a deeply ironic Russian edge.
