This Academy Award winning film is the story of a family and a people, suffused with Nikita Mikhalkov’s customary sense of irony and political symbolism. Set in 1936, as Stalin’s purges gather momentum, Mikhalkov plays a retired officer who has retreated to the country with his wife Maroussia (Ingeborga Dapkunaite) and 6-year-old daughter Nada (Nadezhda Mikhalkova —the director’s own daughter). When a former lover of Maroussia arrives, the family’s idyll is pushed to shattering.