Jasulan suffers from a heart disease. To treat him, his mother takes him to a sanatorium in Almaty, the capital of Kazkahstan. The boy discovers the big city, where everyone speaks Russian, and the crushing monotony of the state-run institution where he has been sent to recuperate. This is a wonderfully drawn portrait of the inelegance of the Soviet years, of being poor in the flattest countryside imaginable. Omirbaev is, as always, poetically precise with subtle injections of humour.