SIBERIA. MONAMOUR

Seven-year-old Lyoshka lives with his devoutly religious grandfather Ivan in a remote village in the Siberian taiga. The boy’s only friend is the wolf hybrid that prowls round their hut. Lyoshka’s mother is dead, and he longs for his father to return – unaware that his father was killed in a knife battle. His uncle Yuri sometimes pulls up in a horse-drawn cart. He brings provisions to his two relatives in the lonely forest, where life is hard and food hard to come by. On one such mission, Yuri is savaged by the wolf-dogs: Lyoshka and Ivan’s last link with the outside world has been cut. They are surrounded by people with souls to match the hostile landscape: a lieutenant in the Russian army, a young soldier, a prostitute, two greedy antiquities thieves, Yuri’s embittered wife Anna – and all their lives are fatefully interconnected. When Lyoshka sees his grandfather shooting at the canine he views as his pet, he runs away and falls down an old drainage pit. Ivan summons up the last of his strength to set out for help. He is pursued by the wolf-dogs as snow starts to fall in the taiga. Slava Ross tells a breathtakingly photographed tale of biblical power about good and evil, about lives in which no mercy can be expected, about what it means to show humanity and pity in a brutal world.