A Powerful debut feature in a hybrid of lyrical and documentary styles. A train departing from the Kyrgyz mountains initiates an inner voyage, composed with the patient rhythm of a fable but described in a voice so haunted it must be truth. A panoramic, black and white evocation of the central Asian steppe is supported by an allusive first-person narrator who gradually discloses an unrecognized tragedy of cultural disintegration. Base camps, wild horsed, another world outside the window and a phantom within: the sparse landscape reluctantly surrenders the sensations of a man forces from his home and a nation split from its soul.