In this luminous restoration conducted through Martin Scorsese's World Cinema Project, a 17th-century poet wanders the desert for inspiration and conjures an early-20th-century tale of a boy raised in Korea to avenge the murder of the half-sister he never knew. The seed of this fate is corrosive to the boy like a disease, as he is drawn to the far-off lands of Russia and Sakhalin Island to exact his dark purpose. Dislocations of time and culture throughout this 1989 film convey the sense of national upheaval and intergenerational trauma all too familiar to the Kazakh filmmakers, director Ermek Shinarbaev and Korean-Russian writer Anatoli Kim.

D: Ermek Shinarbaev, Kazakhstan, 1989, 1h39m

Programmed as part of the Asian Diaspora on Screen series in collaboration with the Dartmouth Asian American Studies Collective (DAASC).