Days of Eclipse

The young doctor Malyanov is sent to a town in Turkmenistan after finishing his medical training. Heat, dust and emptiness. Around him live people of several nationalities, most of them descended from families who were deported or displaced. Malyanov tries to carry on a piece of research, but something keeps getting in his way. Aleksandr Sokurov directed the film from a novel by the Strugatsky brothers, though it moves a long way from the book. The telling is not of events but of a condition: heat, silence, things that are not explained. The forced displacement of whole peoples in the Soviet period is documented history; the film uses it as its background. Two hours and twenty minutes, and difficult on purpose.