Days of Eclipse

Directed by Aleksandr Sokurov

With Aleksei Ananishnov, Eskender Umarov, Irina Sokolova, Vladimir Zamanskiy and Kirill Dudkin

This bleak late soviet-era drama follows the career of Malyanov, a young medical school graduate who has been sent to work in Turkmenia. Here he runs into a hodge-podge of people of differing ethnicities, all of them victims of the government's earlier mania for relocating and eliminating whole ethnic groups and classes of people. These desperately unhappy people are unable to find any pleasure in this diverse companionship, but instead are antagonistic to it, and often resort to desperate measures in their doomed attempts to ease their pain.