White Dew

Belye Rosy is an old Belarusian village due to be knocked down and replaced with apartment blocks. Most of the residents have already gone; the ones still there have no intention of leaving. Fedos Khodas is eighty, a widower who came through three wars and raised three sons: the eldest calculates everything, the youngest laughs at everything, and the middle one left for the Kuril Islands so long ago that his father no longer knows what sort of man he became. Igor Dobrolyubov tells the story of a city swallowing a village as a warm, slightly sour comedy rather than a lament. Thirty-six million people saw it across the Soviet Union, which still makes it the most widely seen film Belarusian cinema has produced.