A 8-year-old boy is travelling with his mother towards his grandfather, but their journey is stopped when the young woman dies of typhus in an unknown town, just as poor and in ruins as any other on the way. However, the boy is determined to go on. Eva Neymann’s film is a visual journey into a country covered in snow and left poor by war. This is a place of beautiful, deserted landscapes and people overcome by both need and greed. The tranquil black-and-white images created by Lithuanian cameraman Rimmvydas Leipus masterfully evoke the atmosphere of the Second World War’s penultimate year in the Soviet Union. The picture was based on motifs drawn from the autobiographical story of the same name by writer and screenwriter Friedrich Gorenstein, who also penned the script for Tarkovsky’s Solaris.