The Ugly Swans

The near future. The writer Viktor Banev gets himself onto a United Nations commission travelling to Tashlinsk, a town that has been cut off from the world. It rains there without stopping and a strange light washes everything in red. Odd beings the locals call the wetters have taken over a boarding school for gifted children. Banev's daughter is one of the pupils. Konstantin Lopushansky adapted the film from the 1967 novel by the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. The science fiction here is not action but a wet, grey atmosphere, and the real subject is that the children have become cleverer than their parents and no longer need them.