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Arriving for a family gathering on a sprawling estate in the middle of the steppe, errant son Viktor is reunited with his large family whom he hasn’t seen for twenty-five years. Although unaware of the fact, Viktor has been followed by a group of men in suits who start harassing those assembled for the gathering. With danger lurking outside, the irascible temper of certain family members becomes the least of their problems. If we try to confront our own history, events might catch up with us too fast. By turns circumspect and poetic, this nevertheless oppressive film draws on elegiac nuances to capture the mixed fortunes of this extended lineage, which has experienced all manner of hardships. It attempts the kind of reconciliation with the past familiar from the work of Otar Iosseliani, yet one cannot deny its sweeping, powerful images as embodied in the Eastern European cinema of Nikita Mikhalkov or Timur Bekmambetov. The director was inspired by a childhood spent in the steppe region along the river Don, and also by Westerns, whose sense of inevitability he projected into his film. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)