Summary
A spectral cityscape—half Petrograd, half fever-dream—materialises through Liveriy Avid’s script like ink bleeding across parchment: the young cartographer Arkadiy (K. Askochenski) receives an anonymous copper plate engraved with streets that never existed, yet when he inks it the avenues crawl off the paper into brick and fog, pulling him into a twilight district where every citizen is a double of someone he once betrayed. Here, a lamplighter with Pavel Knorr’s weary eyes confesses he burns memories instead of oil; a ballerina (Yanina Mirato) pirouettes on a rooftop garden suspended above an abyss, her shoes leaving trails of primroses that wither into accusations; a retired anarchist (Boris Svetozarov) keeps time by the heartbeat of a caged bird whose pulse stops whenever Arkadiy lies. The cartographer’s lover, Leda (Zoya Barantsevich), arrives searching for him but finds only shifting façades that echo her own unspoken cruelty. Each dawn the city resets, yet scars accumulate: a missing finger, a stammer, a snow-flaked daguerreotype growing fainter. Arkadiy believes that if he can map the city before it vanishes he will escape, but every line he draws births a new cul-de-sac of remorse. Meanwhile Amo Bek-Nazaryan’s spectral magistrate presides over trials where the accused must cross-examine their own shadows; verdicts are sealed inside lantern globes that explode into flocks of white moths guiding the condemned toward an iron bridge that folds into itself like a paper snake. Konstantin Dzhemarov’s bell-founder casts a single toll that reverberates backwards, unravelling hours until childhood guilt pools in the streets like spilled mercury. Ivan Khudoleyev’s mute archivist frantically shelves chronologies that crumble into dust the moment they are catalogued, whispering only through marginalia: “The world ended yesterday, but the paperwork survives.” When Arkadiy finally reaches the city’s vanishing point he confronts not a minotaur but his own unmapped heart—an organ whose geography is more savage than any metropolis. The closing shot: Leda steps into the empty plate, now blank, and the camera lingers on the copper until it oxidises into verdigris the exact shade of lost hope.
