House of Fools

Ingushetia, 1996. In a psychiatric hospital on the Chechen border the patients have built an order of their own. Zhanna plays the accordion, and her music settles everyone. In her mind she has a fiancé: Bryan Adams. One day the staff walk out and leave the hospital, and the patients are alone in the middle of a war. Then Chechen fighters retreating from Russian troops move into the building, and Zhanna falls for one of them and imagines leaving with him. Andrei Konchalovsky's film drew on a real hospital in Shali, where the staff fled during the bombing and some of the patients died. Bryan Adams appears as himself. It took the Grand Jury Prize at Venice in 2002.