This film depicts a teenage boy's stumbling journey into adulthood from the streets of early 70s Soviet Moscow, to a lost city in the timeless Uzbekistan desert,to a post-communist Russian future that seemed impossible during the height of the cold war. Trapped by obligations to his preteen brother, archaeologist single mother, and aging grandfather, the illicit temptations of youth, and the social hypocrisy of life in a USSR 15 years away from its own inevitable transformation, 18-year-old Sergey rebels by sidestepping responsibility altogether. Karen Shakhnazarov directs.