Young biologist Yura leads a quiet provincial life with his job at the Natural History Museum. He’s still living at home with his mother – if only her pompous admirer wouldn’t annoy him with his readings from “Jonathan Livingston Seagull”. In search of the marmot, a creature thought extinct on the Southern Ukrainian steppe, Yura is witness to arson. Trying to draw public attention to the injustice, he unexpectedly ends up on a sensationalist local news portal and is drawn ever deeper into the absurd entanglements of a network that no one is really interested in unravelling.

Roman Bondarchuk’s long-awaited second feature is a playful media and political satire with shades of science fiction: ludicrous, bizarre, self-critical and subversive, without losing love and faith in its protagonists. Shot shortly before the Russian invasion and completed in the middle of the war, with almost no direct reference to the fighting and yet highly topical, it captures the fragile humanity at stake here. A monument to Kherson – wild periphery, central theatre of war and Bondarchuk’s home region.

The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival.