Kirill Chadov

A century ago, a loving son asked for his heart to be cut from his chest after his death and buried beside his mother. Today, when his mother collapses in front of him, another son wishes her dead so that he can return to his video games. But the game puts his own heart on trial, forcing him to answer one impossible question: is he a loving son? This hybrid essay about my mother, shot on 16mm, combines archival footage, expressionist staging, autofiction and video-game animation.

For the first time in her life Virineya is an ethnic Moksha woman who grew up in Moscow, meets Vasily, a man of her own nationality. She is an aspiring model who appears in cheap advertisements, he works at a garbage processing facility. On her days-off she likes to have a glass of cold beer, he enjoys playing tennis. They are very different, but they have a common land of their ancestors, where they have never been, as well as the endangered language of their people, which they speak but poorly…

After a mystic ceremony in the forest the girl wakes up in a house without windows, where a cult, isolated from the sun, resides. Their only source of light is the sacred icon windows producing artificial light. The protagonist will undergo the rite of initiation and meet their dying king to escape from the house.