Khrystyna Deilyk

The film is based on the biographical events of the Crimeans' leader, human rights activist, Soviet political prisoner and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, Mustafa Jemilev. Summer of 1980. Mustafa Jemilev spends a four-year exile in Yakut village Zyryanka, where he works at an oxygen station. Every day he fills rusty tanks with oxygen and rolls them to the dock. This monotonous and exhausting work makes him resembled to the mythological Sisyphus. The events happen after 300-days hunger strike, which made him known all around the globe.

A series of odd coincidences has left Lukas, an interpreter for an OSCE military checkpoint inspection tour, stranded near a small southern Ukrainian steppe town. With nowhere to turn, this city boy finds shelter at the home of a colorful local named Vova. With Vova as his guide, Lukas is confronted by a universe beyond his imagination, one in which life seems utterly detached from any identifiable structure. Fascinated by his host and his host's daughter Marushka, with whom he is rapidly falling in love, Lukas’s contempt for provincial life slowly melts away and sets him on a quest for a happiness he had never known could exist.