Professor Sretenski is a scientist and director of a research center in Russia. He is separated from his wife and lives alone. His daughter, who lives with the mother, comes to his home and stays with him for a period, leaving her daughter with him. He raises his granddaughter, feeling a great affection for her.
Acting
Gluzskiy's face does what scripts fear to write.
Direction
Averbakh lets silence scream louder than dialogue.
Production
Cramped Soviet apartments as emotional architecture.
Director
Ilya Averbakh
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Soviet cinema rarely showed domestic male vulnerability; this was quietly radical.
Margarita Terekhova later played the mother in Tarkovsky's Mirror—another fractured family epic.
SU
