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Director's Statement
It all began when I watched, for the umpteenth time, the 1952 American Western HIGH NOON. At some point, just for fun, I came up with a Russian version of the story. At first, I didn’t take it seriously. But for some reason, I gradually came to believe that I could really do this. I wanted to make a full-on, modern-day Western. When we started to study the subject of the story, as we began to visit farms, naturally, the plot and the genre began to fall apart. We were deluged with observations that pulled the story in a completely different direction. We shot the film in the north, on the Tersky Coast of the White Sea, in the village of Umba in the Murmansk region. The area has a unique natural beauty: pinewoods, cliffs, and small plots of land that used to house farms. It was crucial that we convey the sense that this village is very far from Moscow, that this is a place where the relationship between people and government is more direct. When I saw the way trees and bushes consume and destroy the deserted farms, I knew this was the perfect location for our shoot. Here, you get a real sense that nature is watching everything we do, that it is stronger than us.