Alyonka

The film is set in 1955, in the middle of the migration from Russia to the steppes of Kazakhstan. A few people are travelling in the back of an open truck, and each of them tells their own story. Alyonka Muratova, thirteen, talks Dmitry, the chief mechanic, into giving up his seat in the cab to a young mother with a baby. So the two of them ride in the back. With them is a newly qualified dentist who has not been able to find a post. There is also Stefan, hitchhiking with his dog, who hopes his wife will come back to him. And a woman who lost one of her twin daughters in an accident and is going to tell the other one. The film describes these people warmly and without making speeches. Natalya Ovodova and Vasiliy Shukshin appear in Boris Barnet’s eighty six minute Soviet film, completed in 1962.